UNiViRSITY  OF 
CALIFORNIA 
SAN  DIEGO 


Knut  Hamsun 


MR.  ALFRED  A.  KNOPF 

has  been  appointed  the  sole  authorized 
American  publisher  of 

KNUT  HAMSUN 

The  fy  lowing  booh  art  now  nady: 
HUNGER  DREAMERS 

GROWTH  OF  THE  SOIL  PAN 

SHALLOW  SOIL  WANDERERS 

Tbi  {Mowing  art  ichtdultd  for  lattr  publications: 
CHILDREN  OF  THE  TIME  [Spring,  1923] 
VICTORIA  BENONI 

THE  VILLAGE  OF  SEGELFOSS  ROSA 


KNUT  HAMSUN 


Photo  by  Wilse 


Knut  Hamsun 


by 

Hanna  Astrup  Larsen 


Editor  "The  American-Scandinavian 


New  York 

Alfred  •  A  •  Knopf 

Mcmxxii 


COPYRIGHT,  1922,  BY 
ALFRED  A.  KNOPF,  INC. 

Published,  October,  19S2 


Set  up  and  printed  by  the  Vail-Ballou  Co.,  Binohamton,  N.  T. 

Paper  furnished  6i/  W.  F.  Etherington  &  Co.,  New  York. 

Bound  t>v  the  H.  Wolff  Eitate,  A'eic  York, 


MANUFACTURED     IN     THE     UNITED     STATES     OF    AMERICA 


The  author  wishes  to  acknowledge  her  debt 
to  The  American-Scandinavian  Foundation 
for  the  Fellowship  which  enabled  her  to  study 
the  works  of  Hamsun  in  Norway  during  the 
winter  of  1920-1921 


Portraits 


Knut  Hamsun  Frontispiece 

Photo  by  Wilse 


Hamsun  as  a  Young  Man  38 

From  a  drawing  by  Erik  Werenskiold 


Knut  Hamsun  86 

From  a  painting  by  Henrik  Lund 


Hamsun  and  His  Family  134 

Photo  by  Wilse 


THE  WANDERER 


EARLY  LIFE  IN  NORWAY 

KNUT  Hamsun  has  become  identi- 
fied in  our  minds  with  the  lonely 
figure  that  recurs  again  and  again 
in  his  earlier  books,  the  Wanderer  who  is  for 
ever  outside  of  organized  society  and  for  ever 
pays  the  penalty  of  being  different  from 
the  crowd  and  unable  to  conform  to  its  stan- 
dards. That  this  lonely  creature  is  really 
himself  in  a  certain  period  of  his  life  we 
know  from  the  testimony  of  his  own  works. 
Yet  this  vagabond  and  iconoclast  sprang 
from  the  most  conservative  stock  of  Norway. 
He  is  the  descendant  of  an  old  peasant  fam- 
ily in  Gudbrandsdalen,  one  of  the  interior 
mountain  valleys  in  the  heart  of  the  country. 
Gudbrandsdalen  is  a  region  of  proud  his- 
torical traditions.  There,  nine  centuries 
ago,  King  Saint  Olaf  struggled  to  foist  the 
new  religion  on  a  stiff-necked  race  of  pa- 
gans, and  not  far  from  Hamsun's  birthplace 

3 


Knut  Hamsun 

one  of  the  oldest  churches  in  Norway  pro- 
claimed his  victory.  There,  six  centuries  a- 
go,  the  Scotch  invader  Sinclair  was  annihi- 
lated with  all  his  force  when  "the  peasants 
of  Vaage  and  Lesje  and  Lorn  their  whetted 
axes  shouldered,"  as  the  ballad  tells  us,  and 
the  story  is  still  cherished,  still  repeated  to 
every  traveller.  In  this  as  in  other  secluded 
valleys  in  Norway  a  peasant  aristocracy  de- 
veloped, a  hard,  strong  race,  intensely  proud 
of  its  family  and  land,  looking  on  any 
one  who  had  been  less  than  three  generations 
in  the  neighborhood  as  an  interloper,  and 
scorning  the  classes  of  people  who  were  not 
rooted  to  the  soil  by  inherited  homesteads. 
For  the  Norwegian  roving  blood  is  strangely 
tempered  by  a  passionate  attachment  to 
inherited  land,  a  trait  that  is  perhaps  a  sal- 
utary safeguard  against  the  national  restless- 
ness. Artistic  handicrafts  flourished  in  the 
valley.  In  the  Open  Air  Museum  at  Lille- 
hammer  we  may  see  them  even  now,  marvel- 
lous creations  of  hammered  iron,  tapestries 
picturing  scenes  from  the  Bible,  wood  carv- 
ings in  mellow  colors  and  with  a  Ren- 

4 


The  Wanderer 

aissance  exuberance  of  design  overflowing 
even  the  commonest  kitchen  utensils,  all  of  a 
rich  yet  disciplined  beauty  as  if  built  on  age- 
old  artistic  traditions  and  standards. 

Hamsun  counted  among  his  forefathers 
many  of  the  artistic  craftsmen  who  set  their 
stamp  of  culture  upon  their  community. 
His  father's  father  was  a  worker  in  metals. 
The  arts  did  not  bring  wealth  to  those  who 
practised  them,  however,  and  his  parents  at 
the  time  of  his  birth  were  in  straitened  cir- 
cumstances. He  was  born,  August  4,  1859, 
in  Lorn,  in  one  of  the  small  well-weathered 
houses  which  look  so  bleak  and  insignificant 
against  the  mighty  Gudbrandsdalen  uplands. 
When  he  was  four  years  old  his  family  re- 
moved to  the  Lofoten  Islands,  Nordland,  in 
an  effort  to  better  their  fortunes. 

Two  strains  may  be  traced  in  Knut  Ham- 
sun's personality.  By  virtue  of  his  blood  and 
birth  he  had  his  roots  in  a  community  charac- 
terized by  an  unusually  firm  and  solid  culture 
based  on  centuries  of  tradition,  and  this  heri- 
tage we  shall  find  coming  out  in  him  more  and 
more  in  his  later  years.  The  moralist  and 

5 


Knut  Hamsun 

preacher  who  wrote  "Growth  of  the  Soil"  is  a 
true  scion  of  the  best  old  peasant  stock. 
Through  the  impressions  of  his  childhood  and 
early  youth  he  became  affiliated  with  the  vol- 
atile race  of  Nordland,  a  people  as  alien  from 
the  heavier  inland  peasant  as  if  they  lived  on 
different  continents.  The  fishermen  who  play 
with  death  for  the  wealth  of  the  sea  and  de- 
pend for  their  livelihood  on  the  caprices  of 
nature  do  not  easily  harden  into  traditional 
moulds.  Childish  and  improvident,  witty 
and  sentimental,  often  fond  of  the  melodram- 
atic, simple  and  yet  shrewd,  superstitious  but 
brave  beyond  all  praise,  the  native  of  Nord- 
land is  a  type  unlike  every  other  Norwegian. 
Wherever  he  may  roam,  he  will  yearn  for  the 
wonderland  of  his  youth.  It  is  from  this 
Nordland  type  that  Hamsun  has  created  his 
Wanderer  hero,  and  it  was  from  the  nature 
of  Nordland  with  its  alternations  of  melting 
loveliness  and  stark  gloom  that  he  drew  his 
poetic  inspiration. 

At  the  very  time  when  Hamsun  was  spend- 
ing his  childhood  in  the  Lofoten  Islands,  Jo- 
nas Lie,  the  literary  discoverer  of  Arctic  Nor- 

6 


The  Wanderer 

way,  wrote  his  idyllic  little  story  "Second 
Sight"  in  which  he  has  really  delineated  a 
"Wanderer"  type,  his  hero  being  a  gifted 
Nordland  lad  who  is  set  apart  from  ordinary 
people  by  his  strange  mental  malady  and  who, 
wherever  he  goes,  feels  himself  an  alien.  In 
this  book,  written  at  a  time  when  not  even 
fixed  steamship  routes  united  Nordland  with 
the  southern  part  of  the  country  (railroads 
are  even  yet  unknown),  Jonas  Lie  has  given 
us  a  classic  description  of  the  country  in  its 
virgin  state  of  isolation.  It  gives  the  key  to 
that  mysterious,  extravagant  strain  which  be- 
longs to  the  Nordland  type,  and  throws  light 
on  the  sources  from  which  Hamsun  drew  his 
hero. 

The  words  that  to  other  people  convey  only 
commonplaces  become  magnified  in  the  Nord- 
land mind  accustomed  to  the  ecstatic  moods 
of  nature,  Lie  tells  us.  Fish  to  a  Nordlanding 
means  "Lofoten's  and  Finmarken's  millions, 
an  infinite  variety,  from  the  spouting  whales 
that  penetrate  our  fjords  driving  huge  masses 
of  fish  like  a  froth  before  them,  to  the  tiniest 
minnow.  When  he  speaks  of  birds,  the  Nord- 

7 


Knut  Hamsun 

landing  does  not  mean  merely  an  eatable  fowl 
or  two,  but  a  heavenly  host,  billowing  in  the 
air  like  white  breakers  around  the  bird  crags, 
shrieking  and  fluttering  and  filling  the  air 
like  a  veritable  snow-storm  over  the  nesting- 
places.  He  thinks  of  the  eider-duck  and  the 
tystey;  the  duck  and  the  sea-pie  swimming 
in  fjord  and  sound  or  perched  on  the  rocks; 
the  gull,  the  osprey,  and  the  eagle  sailing 
through  the  air;  the  owl  moaning  weirdly  in 
the  mountain  clefts — a  world  of  birds.  A 
storm  at  sea  to  him  means  sudden  hurricanes 
that  sweep  down  from  the  mountains  and  up- 
root buildings — so  that  people  at  home  often 
have  to  tie  down  their  houses  with  chains 
— waves  rushing  in  from  the  Arctic  Ocean 
fathoms  high,  burying  big  rocks  and  sker- 
ries in  their  froth  and  then  receding  so  fast 
that  a  ship  may  be  left  high  and  dry  and  be 
smashed  right  in  the  open  sea ;  hosts  of  brave 
men  sailing  before  the  wind  to  save  not  only 
their  own  lives  but  the  dearly  bought  boat- 
load on  which  the  lives  of  those  at  home  de- 
pend. 

"There  in  the  North  popular  fancy  from 
8 


The  Wanderer 

mythical  times  has  imagined  the  home  of  all 
the  powers  of  evil.  There  the  Lapp  has 
made  himself  feared  by  his  sorceries,  and 
there  at  the  outermost  edge  of  the  world, 
washed  by  the  breakers  of  the  dark,  wintry 
grey  Arctic  Ocean,  stand  the  gods  of  primi- 
tive times,  the  demoniacal,  terrible,  half  form- 
less powers  of  darkness  against  whom  even 
the  JEsir  did  battle,  but  who  were  not  entirely 
vanquished  before  St.  Olaf  with  his  cruciform 
sword  'set  them  in  stock  and  stone.'-  The 
terrors  of  nature  have  created  an  army  of 
evil  demons  that  draw  people  to  them,  ghosts 
of  drowned  men  who  have  not  been  buried  in 
Christian  earth,  mountain  titans,  the  sea 
draug  who  sails  in  his  half  boat  and  in  the 
winter  nights  shrieks  terribly  out  on  the  fjord. 
Many  a  man  in  real  danger  has  perished  be- 
cause his  comrades  were  afraid  of  the  draug, 
and  we  of  second  sight  can  see  him. 

"But  even  though  the  overwhelming  might 
of  nature  bears  down  with  oppressive  weight 
on  everything  living  along  that  dark,  wintry, 
frothing  coast,  where  nine  months  of  the 
year  are  a  constant  twilight  and  three  of  these 

9 


Knut  Hamsun 

are  without  even  a  glimpse  of  the  sun,  so 
that  people's  minds  become  filled  with  fear 
of  the  dark,  yet  Nordland  also  possesses  the 
opposite  extreme  in  its  sun-warmed,  clear- 
skied,  scent-filled  summers  with  their  endless 
play  of  infinitely  varied  colors  and  tints,  when 
distances  of  seventy  or  eighty  miles  seem  to 
melt  away  so  that  we  can  shout  across  them, 
when  the  mountain  clothes  itself  in  brownish 
green  grass  to  the  very  top — in  Lofoten  to  a 
height  of  two  thousand  feet — and  the  slender 
birch  trees  wreathe  the  tops  of  the  hills  and 
the  edges  of  the  mountain  clefts  like  a  dance 
of  sixteen-year-old  white-clad  girls,  while 
the  fragrance  of  strawberries  and  raspber- 
ries rises  to  you  through  the  warm  air  as  you 
pass  in  your  shirt  sleeves,  and  the  day  is  so 
hot  that  you  long  to  bathe  in  the  sun-filled, 
rippling  sea  which  is  clear  to  the  very  bot- 
tom. 

"The  learned  say  that  the  intensities  of 
color  and  fragrance  in  the  far  North  are  due 
to  the  power  of  the  light  which  fills  the  air 
when  the  sun  shines  without  interruption  day 
and  night.  Therefore  one  can  not  pick  so 

10 


The  Wanderer 

aromatic  strawberries  and  raspberries  or  so 
fragrant  birch  boughs  in  any  other  clime. 
If  a  fairy  idyl  has  any  home,  it  is  certainly 
in  the  deep  fjord  valleys  of  Nordland  in  the 
summer.  It  is  as  though  the  sun  were  kiss- 
ing nature  so  much  more  tenderly  because 
they  have  such  a  short  time  to  be  together  and 
must  soon  part  again." 

Jonas  Lie's  description,  which  I  have 
taken  the  liberty  to  quote  in  abbreviated  form, 
gives  a  picture  of  the  surroundings  in  which 
Hamsun  spent  his  boyhood.  It  would  have 
been  impossible  to  find  any  spot  in  the  world 
more  suited  to  nourish  the  fancy  of  an  im- 
aginative, impressionable  boy.  Lonely  as  he 
was,  he  had  little  to  interest  him  or  occupy 
his  mind  except  what  he  could  find  for  him- 
self out  of  doors.  He  was  put  to  work  herd- 
ing cattle,  and  spent  long  dreamy  hours  alone 
revelling  in  the  loveliness  of  the  light  Nord- 
land summer.  It  was  then  he  laid  the  foun- 
dation for  his  habit  of  roaming  alone  in  the 
woods  and  fields,  and  there  he  gained  that 
intimate,  tender  knowledge  of  nature  which 
appears  in  his  works.  In  telling  of  his  child- 

II 


Knut  Hamsun 

hood,  Hamsun  says  that  the  animals  and  birds 
became  his  friends.  He  speaks  also  of  the 
deep  impression  which  the  sea  made  upon 
him.  His  uncle's  house,  where  he  spent 
some  of  his  boyhood,  was  built  above  the 
ocean  stream,  Glimma,  which  rushed  over 
a  rocky  bottom,  sometimes  one  way,  some- 
times another,  according  to  the  tide,  but  al- 
ways in  motion.  Beyond  it  lay  the  open  sea. 
The  sharp  contrasts  of  nature,  its  alter- 
nations between  darkness  and  light,  are  re- 
flected in  the  temperament  of  the  Nordland 
people  who  are  easily  swung  from  one  ex- 
treme to  another.  Underneath  the  bright- 
ness and  levity  there  is  a  consciousness  of 
superstitions  that  are  felt  sometimes  as  dark 
and  sinister  forces  waiting  to  drag  men  away 
from  the  light  into  the  gloomy  void  where  the 
evil  powers  reign.  The  boy  Knut  Hamsun's 
nature  was  like  a  sensitive  stringed  instrument 
vibrating  to  the  faintest  breath  of  nature's 
moods,  and  we  find  in  his  works  the  nervous- 
ness, the  quick  transitions,  and  the  swinging 
between  extremes  of  exaltation  and  despair 
which  belong  to  the  Nordland  type.  While 

12 


The  Wanderer 

the  brightness  predominates,  the  gloom  is  also 
present,  especially  in  his  earliest,  most  per- 
sonal works. 

The  years  he  spent  with  his  clergyman  uncle 
were  not  happy.  The  uncle  had  no  idea  of 
how  to  handle  a  highstrung  boy,  and  his 
method  of  education  consisted  of  many  lick- 
ings, much  hard  work,  and  few  hours  for 
play.  So  lonely  and  dreary  was  the  boy's 
life  that  he  found  his  chief  amusement  in 
roaming  about  in  the  cemetery,  spelling  out 
the  inscriptions  on  crosses  and  slabs,  making 
up  stories  about  them,  and  talking  to  himself, 
or  listening  to  the  wind  rustling  in  the  grass 
that  grew  tall  on  neglected  graves.  Occa- 
sionally the  old  weather  vane  on  the  church 
steeple  would  let  out  a  terrible  shriek  when 
the  wind  veered.  It  sounded  like  "iron  grit- 
ting its  teeth  against  some  other  iron." 
Sometimes  he  would  help  the  old  grave-dig- 
ger in  his  work,  and  he  had  strict  injunctions 
on  what  to  do  if  bits  of  bone  or  tufts  of 
hair  worked  their  way  out  to  the  surface. 
They  were  to  be  put  back  in  place  and  de- 
cently covered.  Once,  however,  he  ventured 

13 


Knut  Hamsun 

to  disobey  the  gravedigger  and  take  with  him 
a  tooth  which  he  thought  he  could  use  for 
some  little  object  he  was  fashioning.  In  the 
short  story  "A  Ghost"  in  the  collection 
"Things  that  Have  Happened  to  Me,"  where 
he  draws  this  dismal  story  of  his  childhood, 
he  tells  how  the  dead  owner  appeared  to  him 
and  threatened  him  at  intervals  for  years 
afterwards,  even  after  he  had  left  the  house 
of  his  uncle  and  was  living  with  his  parents, 
where  he  shared  a  room  with  his  brothers  and 
sisters.  The  apparition  froze  him  with  fear 
and  tortured  him  so  that  he  was  often  tempted 
to  throw  himself  in  the  Glimma  and  end  it 
all.  Of  the  effect  that  this  incident  had  upon 
him  he  writes:  "This  man,  this  red-bearded 
messenger  from  the  land  of  death,  did  me 
much  harm  by  the  unspeakable  gloom  he  cast 
over  my  childhood.  Since  then  I  have  had 
more  than  one  vision,  more  than  one  strange 
encounter  with  the  inexplicable  but  nothing 
that  has  gripped  me  with  such  force.  And 
yet  perhaps  the  effect  upon  me  was  not  all 
harmful.  I  have  often  thought  of  that.  It 
has  occurred  to  me  that  he  was  one  of  the  first 


The  Wanderer 

things  that  made  me  grit  my  teeth  and  harden 
myself.  In  my  later  experiences  I  have  often 
had  need  of  it." 

In  view  of  the  high  position  clergymen 
hold  in  Norway,  and  especially  considering 
the  prestige  attached  to  the  official  class  fifty 
years  ago,  it  seems  odd  that  a  clergyman's 
nephew,  an  inmate  of  his  house  for  years, 
should  have  been  slated  for  a  shoemaker,  but 
evidently  there  was  no  money  with  which  to 
send  Knut  to  school,  and  perhaps  his  mental 
gifts  were  not  of  the  caliber  to  promise  that 
he  would  fit  easily  into  any  one  of  the  usual 
professional  niches.  After  his  confirmation, 
which  is  the  Norwegian  boy's  entrance  to 
manhood,  he  was  therefore  apprenticed  to  a 
cobbler  in  the  city  of  Bodo  on  the  mainland. 
In  his  own  mind,  however,  he  was  quite  de- 
termined that  he  was  to  be  a  poet,  and  it  was 
while  working  for  the  cobbler  that  he  pub- 
lished his  first  literary  venture,  a  highly  ro- 
mantic poem  called  "Meeting  Again."  This 
was  followed  by  the  story  "Bjorger,  by  Knud 
Pedersen  Hamsund,"  a  gloomy,  introspective 
tale  of  an  orphaned  peasant  boy  and  a  lady 

15 


Knut  Hamsun 

of  high  degree  who  died  for  love  of  him 
—a  foreshadowing  of  the  motif  in  "Victoria." 
In  spite  of  its  immaturity,  its  absurdity  even, 
the  story,  according  to  the  judgment  of  crit- 
ics to-day,  shows  flashes  of  Hamsun's  peculiar 
genius.  Alas,  there  were  no  critics  wise  and 
sympathetic  enough  to  see  its  promise  at  the 
time,  if  indeed  any  critics  read  it.  The  book 
was  printed  by  the  nineteen-year-old  author  at 
his  own  expense,  paid  for  by  his  hard-earned 
savings,  and  was  bought  by  a  few  people  in 
Bodo,  but  hardly  circulated  beyond  the  con- 
fines of  the  city. 

Naturally  the  cobbler's  bench  could  not 
long  confine  his  restlessness,  and,  after  a  short 
experience  as  a  coal-heaver  on  the  docks  of 
Bodo — where  his  eye-glasses  attracted  amused 
attention  as  out  of  keeping  with  his  work- 
Hamsun  set  out  on  the  wanderings  that  were 
to  last  full  ten  years.  He  taught  a  little 
school,  was  clerk  in  a  sheriff's  office*,  and 
crushed  stones  on  the  road. 

The  experiences  of  this  period  were  the 
foundation  of  his  two  novels  "Under  the 
Autumn  Star"  and  "A  Wanderer  Plays  with 

16 


The  Wanderer 

Muted  Strings,"  bound  in  the  English  edition 
under  the  common  title  "Wanderers." 
Written  many  years  later  from  thd  stand- 
point of  an  elderly  citizen  who  leaves  his 
home  in  the  city  to  revisit  the  haunts  of  his 
youth  and  play  at  being  a  vagrant  laborer 
once  more,  they  give  his  adventures  in  the 
softening  light  of  retrospect.  A  touch  of 
personal  description  may  be  found  in  the 
lines,  "I  taught  myself  to  walk  with  long, 
tenacious  steps.  The  proletarian  appearance 
I  had  already  in  my  face  and  hands." 

There  is  a  lingering  tenderness  in  the  au- 
thor's treatment  of  these  years  which  would 
indicate  that  at  the  time  of  writing  he  looked 
back  upon  them  almost  with  regretful  long- 
ing. We  do  not  find  the  smallest  trace  of 
the  acrid  bitterness  which  he  put  into  the 
short  stories  from  his  American  experiences 
or  into  the  account  of  his  struggles  to  gain 
a  foothold  in  Christiania.  The  roving  life 
without  fixed  habitation  or  routine  had  its 
charms  for  him  and  it  gave  him  an  oppor- 
tunity to  be  much  out  of  doors.  Strong  and 
capable  as  he  was,  the  manual  labor  in  it- 

'7 


Knut  Hamsun 

self  held  no  terrors  for  him,  and  he  was  rather 
proud  of  his  inventive  skill.  "Under  the 
Autumn  Star"  recounts  a  number  of  small 
technical  triumphs,  chief  among  which  was 
a  marvellous  saw  for  cutting  timber  on  the 
root — an  actual  invention  of  Hamsun's. 
Not  many  years  ago  he  replied  in  answer  to 
a  question  in  an  enquete  that  the  proudest 
achievement  of  his  life  was  the  invention  of 
this  saw,  in  the  practicability  of  which  he 
still  had  faith,  although  I  believe  it  has  never 
been  perfected  for  actual  use. 

During  the  time  when  he  ate  and  slept  with 
servants  and  tramped  the  road  with  other 
day  laborers,  while  observing  the  upper  class 
from  the  vantage  point  of  his  own  obscurity, 
Hamsun  garnered  a  full  sheaf  of  those  cur- 
ious and  startling  incidents  by  means  of  which 
he  keeps  his  readers  in  a  constant  state  of  sur- 
prise. Meanwhile  he  did  not  forget  his  old 
ambition  to  become  a  poet.  He  felt  the  need 
of  an  education,  and  gradually  worked  his 
way  southward  to  Christiania,  where  he  en- 
tered the  University. 

The  experiment  was  not  a  success.  At  that 
18 


The  Wanderer 

time  the  University  was  much  more  than 
now  under  the  influence  of  old  academic 
traditions,  and  did  not  welcome  the  rustic  in 
search  of  knowledge  as  cordially  as  perhaps 
it  would  have  done  to-day.  Moreover,  the 
former  cobbler  and  road-laborer  was  un- 
couth in  his  manner,  bursting  with  loud- 
voiced  opinions,  and  by  no  means  filled  with 
the  proper  reverence  for  authority.  He  soon 
realized  that  he  was  a  misfit  in  University 
circles,  and  gave  up  the  attempt  in  disgust. 
Of  more  benefit  to  him  was  a  trip  to  the  con- 
tinent which  he  was  enabled  to  make.  After 
his  return  he  went  back  to  his  old  life  on  the 
road,  but  his  intellect  was  more  and  more 
reaching  out  beyond  the  humble  work  by 
which  he  earned  his  living.  Finally  he  made 
his  escape  and  took  passage  to  America. 


FROM  THE  WHEATFIELDS  TO  THE 
FISHING  BANKS 

IN  the  early  eighties,  when  Hamsun 
started  out  for  America,  the  tide  of 
Norwegian  immigration  was  at  its 
height.  Not  only  were  thousands  and  thou- 
sands of  young  men  and  women  going  across 
the  sea  to  try  to  better  their  worldly  status, 
but  America  had  come  to  be  looked  upon  as 
a  spiritual  as  well  as  an  economic  land  of 
promise.  The  poets,  Bjornson,  Ibsen,  Kiel- 
land,  Jonas  Lie  and  others  were  busy  send- 
ing their  heroes  and  heroines  over  there  to  find 
expansion  of  life  or  perhaps  to  come  back 
and  be  the  fresh,  salty  stream  in  the  back 
waters  of  Norwegian  narrowness  and  pre- 
judice. We  need  only  call  to  mind  Lona 
Hessel  in  "Pillars  of  Society."  Knut  Ham- 
sun had,  of  course,  read  these  books,  and  when 
he  started  out  for  the  New  World  he  did  not 
go  merely  as  an  immigrant  to  seek  his  for- 

20 


The  Wanderer 

tune.  He  hoped  to  find  those  larger  oppor- 
tunities for  leading  his  own  life  and  using  his 
gifts  which  the  poets  had  been  telling  him 
about.  He  had  bruised  himself  on  Old  World 
littleness;  quite  naturally  he  looked  to  the 
New  World  for  bigger  visions,  ampler  spaces, 
and  a  saner  estimate  of  a  man's  worth.  In 
this  he  was  destined  to  be  sorely  disappointed. 
And  yet  some  of  the  things  he  sought,  and 
even  more  those  he  learned  to  value  later  in 
life,  were  there,  but  he  failed  to  find  them. 

His  dream  of  being  a  poet  was  still  alive  in 
him,  and  when  he  came  to  his  countrymen  in 
the  Middle  West  he  announced  to  a  friend 
that  he  was  going  to  write  poetry  for  the  Nor- 
wegian people  in  America.  To  one  who 
knows  the  Middle  Western  settlements,  there 
is  something  pathetic  in  this  youthful  ambi- 
tion. God  knows  that  if  any  one  needs  a  poet 
it  is  the  immigrant  who  is  torn  violently  from 
his  contact  with  the  spiritual  life  of  the  old 
country  and  has  not  yet  taken  root  in  the 
new,  but  the  Hamsun  of  that  day  had  no  mes- 
sage which  his  emigrated  countrymen  cared 
to  hear.  Like  other  immigrants  they  were  ab- 

21 


Knut  Hamsun 

sorbed  in  the  task  of  building  a  new  com- 
munity, and  when  this  work  left  them  any 
leisure  they  preferred  to  sing  the  old  songs 
and  dream  the  old  dreams  of  the  fjaells  and 
fjords.  Immigrants  are  generally  very  con- 
servative, and  cling  with  all  the  fibres  of 
their  affection  to  the  old  melodies.  They 
have  little  ear  for  any  new  voice  that  lifts 
itself  among  them.  But  the  Middle  West 
has  never  at  any  time  had  much  use  for  the 
dreamer  and  visionary,  and  in  Hamsun's  day 
it  was  more  than  now  a  country  of  absorp- 
tion in  material  things  by  as  much  as  it  was 
nearer  pioneer  times. 

Hamsun  soon  found  that  in  order  to  make 
his  living  he  would  have  to  work  hard  under 
conditions  more  distasteful  to  him  than  his  old 
roving  life  in  Norway.  For  a  while  he  cher- 
ished a  hope  that  he  might  be  able  to  make 
his  way  in  some  manner  more  suited  to  his 
mental  equipment.  He  came  under  the  in- 
fluence of  a  Norwegian  writer  and  clergy- 
man, Kristoffer  Janson,  of  Minneapolis,  who 
tried  to  make  a  Unitarian  minister  of  him. 
But  the  faith  that  tries  to  modernize  religion 

22 


The  Wanderer 

by  eliminating  its  mystery  could  not  long 
hold  the  imagination  of  one  who  sees  mystery 
as  the  very  life  and  essence  of  religion.  In 
the  diatribes  on  American  intellectual  life 
published  after  his  return  to  Norway  he  paid 
his  respects  to  Unitarianism  in  an  essay  on 
Emerson.  He  cared  little  for  the  Concord 
philosopher.  Of  the  American  poets  he 
"could  bear  to  read"  certain  parts  of  Walt 
Whitman,  Poe,  and  Hawthorne,  while  he  re- 
ferred to  our  most  beloved  poet  as  "the  somno- 
lent Longfellow."  In  Minneapolis  he  tried 
to  express  his  unflattering  views  on  Ameri- 
can literature  in  lectures,  and  hired  Dania 
Hall  for  the  purpose,  but  Americans  of  Scan- 
dinavian extraction  are  extremely  quick  to 
resent  any  attack  on  their  adopted  country, 
and  refused  to  listen  to  him. 

When  we  remember  how  sober  and  well 
draped  was  the  verse  of  our  great  New  Eng- 
land poets,  we  can  hardly  wonder  that  it 
failed  to  satisfy  the  young  author  who,  a  few 
years  later,  was  to  lay  bare  every  quivering 
nerve  of  his  being  in  "Hunger."  Nor  can  we 
wonder  that  a  young  immigrant,  forced  to 

23 


Knut  Hamsun 

work  hard  in  rough  surroundings,  should  not 
have  discovered  the  finest  flowers  of  Ameri- 
can culture.  It  is  more  remarkable  that  he 
who  was  destined  to  write  the  great  epic  of  the 
pioneer  farmer  in  "Growth  of  the  Soil" 
should  have  failed  utterly  to  see  the  real  ele- 
mental soundness  and  vigor  of  the  pioneer 
community  in  which  he  found  himself,  and 
that  he  should  never  have  had  his  eyes  opened 
to  the  many  obscure  Isaks  toiling  on  Nor- 
wegian farms  in  the  Middle  West.  Yet  this 
too  can  easily  be  understood  when  we  re- 
member how  he  thirsted  for  the  richer, 
subtler  life  of  an  old  community  and  how 
little  his  thirst  had  yet  been  satisfied. 

In  his  later  books  Hamsun  has  glorified  any 
kind  of  work  that  has  to  do  with  practical 
realities  and  is  done  with  a  will.  In  his  youth 
he  learned  by  his  own  experience  the  dead- 
ening, brutalizing  effect  of  toiling  under  the 
lash.  He  was  initiated  on  the  wheatfields  of 
North  Dakota,  where  production  was  car- 
ried on  with  swarms  of  day  laborers.  In  the 
winter,  on  the  grip  of  a  Chicago  street  car,  he 
suffered  the  hardships  of  long  hours  and  low 

24 


The  Wanderer 

pay  for  uncongenial  work.  Finally  he 
plumbed  the  lowest  depths  he  was  fated  to 
know  when  he  spent  some  miserable  seasons  on 
a  fishing-smack  off  New  Foundland. 

Reminiscences  of  these  years  are  found  in 
a  few  short  stories  and  sketches  scattered 
through  various  volumes  of  his  works. 
"Woman's  Victory"  a  story  in  "Struggling 
Life"  (1905)  is  based  on  his  experiences  in 
Chicago,  and  is  prefaced  by  a  paragraph" 
which  gives  a  vivid  picture  of  this  phase  of 
his  American  adventures.  It  begins:  "I  was 
a  street  car  conductor  in  Chicago.  First  I 
had  a  job  on  the  Halstead  line,  which  was  a 
horse  car  line  running  from  the  centre  of  town 
to  the  cattle  market.  We  who  had  night  duty 
were  not  very  safe,  for  there  were  many  sus- 
picious characters  passing  that  way  at  night. 
We  were  not  allowed  to  shoot  and  kill  people, 
for  then  the  company  would  have  had  to 
pay  compensation.  However,  one  is  seldom 
wholly  devoid  of  weapons,  and  there  was  the 
handle  of  the  brake  which  could  be  torn  off 
and  was  a  great  comfort.  Not  that  I  ever  had 
need  of  it  except  once. 

25 


Knut  Hamsun 

"In  1886  I  stood  on  my  car  every  night 
through  the  Christmas  holidays,  and  nothing 
happened.  Once  there  came  a  big  crowd  of 
Irishmen  out  of  the  cattle  market  and  quite 
filled  my  car.  They  were  drunk  and  had 
bottles  along.  They  sang  loudly  and  did  not 
seem  inclined  to  pay,  although  the  car  started. 
Now  they  had  paid  the  company  five  cents 
every  evening  and  every  morning  for  another 
year,  they  said,  and  this  was  Christmas,  and 
they  were  not  going  to  pay.  There  was  noth- 
ing unreasonable  in  this  point  of  view,  but  I 
did  not  dare  to  let  them  off  for  fear  of  the 
company's  'spies'  who  were  on  the  watch  for 
lapses  on  the  part  of  conductors.  A  police- 
man boarded  the  car.  He  stood  there  for  a 
few  minutes,  said  something  about  Christmas 
and  the  weather,  and  jumped  off  again  when 
he  saw  how  crowded  the  car  was.  I  knew 
very  well  that  at  a  word  from  the  policeman 
all  the  passengers  would  have  had  to  pay  their 
fares,  but  I  said  nothing.  Why  didn't 
you  report  us?'  asked  one  of  the  men.  'I 
thought  it  unnecessary,'  said  I,  'I  am  dealing 
with  gentlemen.'  At  that  there  were  some  of 

26 


The  Wanderer 

them  who  began  to  laugh,  but  others  thought 
I  had  spoken  well,  and  they  saw  to  it  that 
everybody  paid." 

The  author's  North  Dakota  experiences 
are  the  subject  of  several  short  stories. 
"Zacchaeus"  in  the  collection  "Brushwood" 
(1903)  gives  a  vivid  picture  of  life  on  Billi- 
bony  farm,  where  work  began  at  three  in  the 
morning  and  went  on  at  a  nerve-racking  speed 
until  the  stars  came  out  at  night,  and  the  only 
comic  relief  was  the  serving  up  to  Zacchaeus 
of  his  own  finger  in  the  stew.  Yet  Zacchaeus 
who  treasured  this  severed  member  of  him- 
self, and  the  cook  who  played  the  gruesome 
trick  because  Zacchaeus  had  laid  hands  on 
his  sacred  "library"  consisting  of  one  old 
newspaper  and  a  book  of  war  songs,  these 
were  human  compared  to  the  creatures  de- 
scribed in  the  sketch  "On  the  Banks"  in 
"Siesta"  (1897).  Never  before  or  since  has 
Hamsun  drawn  a  picture  of  such  stark  and 
unrelieved  hideousness  as  this  description  of 
eight  men  who  were  herded  together  on  the 
boat  regardless  of  race  or  color,  whose  chief 
pleasure  was  maltreating  the  fish  they  caught. 

27 


Knut  Hamsun 

and  whose  obscene  talk  and  lewd  dreams 
rise  from  the  crowded  forecastle  like  a  loath- 
some stench.  To  the  man  of  nerves  and  im- 
agination who  tells  the  story,  the  horror  of 
the  situation  was  deepened  by  the  conscious- 
ness of  the  hostile  powers  of  nature  lying  in 
wait  out  there  on  the  sea  which  closed  around 
him  everywhere  and  of  the  unseen  monsters 
in  the  deep  trying  to  hold  what  is  their  own 
while  the  men  tug  frantically  at  the  nets.  This 
sense  of  being  surrounded  by  hostile  forces 
is  very  unusual  with  Hamsun,  who  generally 
loves  to  dwell  on  the  friendliness  of  nature. 
With  these  months  on  the  fishing  banks, 
the  cup  was  full.  Hamsun  made  up  his 
mind  that  his  wanderings  must  end  and  his 
real  work  begin,  no  matter  at  what  cost.  He 
took  passage  home  on  a  Danish  steamer,  and 
came  to  Christiania  in  1888,  determined  to 
make  his  way  by  writing.  He  was  not  wholly 
unknown  in  the  editorial  offices  of  the  city. 
He  had  been  back  in  Norway  between  the 
years  1883  an^  1886,  when  he  had  attempted 
to  give  lectures  on  literature,  though  not  with 
much  more  success  than  that  which  attended 

28 


The  Wanderer 

his  efforts  in  Minneapolis.  During  his 
second  sojourn  in  the  United  States  he  had 
written  some  correspondences  to  Norwegian 
papers. 

Before  beginning  his  serious  literary  work, 
Hamsun  threw  off  at  white  heat  a  book  en- 
titled "Intellectual  Life  in  Modern  America" 
(1889).  It  is  full  of  prejudice  and  misin- 
formation: arraignment  of  American  culture 
after  following  resplendantly  attired  servant 
girls  on  the  street  and  listening  to  their  con- 
versation (just  as  Kipling  did)  ;  moralizings 
about  the  divorce  evil  based  on  the  stories  in 
sensational  newspapers  without  the  slight- 
est knowledge  of  good  American  home-life; 
condemnation  of  our  art  museums  and  opera 
houses  as  temples  of  Mammon,  and  much 
more  of  the  same  kind.  Yet  the  scathing  satire 
of  the  book,  though  biased,  does  not  always 
miss  its  mark.  Hamsun's  shrewdness  had  pen- 
etrated to  the  weakness  of  American  civiliza- 
tion, its  externalism,  its  materialism,  its  dry- 
ness  and  shallowness.  We  may  also  admit 
that  his  American  experiences  fell  in  a  period 
of  little  intellectual  vitality,  when  the  great 

29 


Knut  Hamsun 

New  Englanders  had  been  relegated  to  school 
declamations,  and  the  modern  quickening  of 
liberal  thought  was  yet  far  distant. 

One  thing,  at  least,  must  be  set  down  to 
Hamsun's  credit.  He  did  not,  like  many 
lesser  writers  from  across  the  sea,  fall  into  the 
cheap  and  easy  task  of  ridiculing  the  simple 
people  -of  the  frontier  or  making  fun  of  his 
own  countrymen  in  their  uncouth  efforts  to 
Americanize  themselves.  His  shafts  were  al- 
ways aimed  at  that  which  passes  for  the  high- 
est in  American  civilization.  Here  as  in  his 
later  onslaughts  on  Ibsen  and  Tolstoy,  his  au- 
dacities loved  a  shining  mark. 

There  are  only  a  few  scattered  references 
in  the  book  to  the  Norwegian  immigrants  in 
this  country,  and  these  are  full  of  sympa- 
thetic comprehension  of  their  difficulties. 
This  fact,  however,  has  not  prevented  "In- 
tellectual Life  in  Modern  America"  from  be- 
ing a  stumbling  block  and  an  offense  to  Am- 
ericans of  Norwegian  extraction.  It  has 
been  one  of  the  main  factors  in  preventing  for 
many  years  the  recognition  of  his  genius  a- 
mong  them. 

30 


The  Wanderer 

In  this  connection  I  recollect  the  first  and 
only  time  I  have  seen  Knut  Hamsun.  It  was 
in  1896,  on  my  first  visit  to  Norway,  when  I 
met  him  at  the  home  of  my  relatives,  and  I 
can  well  remember  how  my  own  youthful 
prairie  patriotism  resented  his  attacks  on  the 
country  my  parents  had  made  their  own. 
As  I  think  of  him  at  this  distance  of  years, 
with  tolerance  for  his  views  on  America,  with 
charity  for  other  things  not  acceptable  to  the 
staid  household  of  which  I  was  a  member,  I 
remember  him  as  a  man  of  distinguished  pres- 
ence, still  in  the  flush  of  young  manhood. 
He  was  distinctly  of  the  fair,  virile  type  met 
in  the  eastern  mountain  districts  where  he  was 
born,  tall,  broad-shouldered,  with  a  particu- 
larly fine  profile  and  well-shaped  head  which 
he  carried  in  a  regal  manner.  He  was  then 
at  the  height  of  his  early  fame. 


THE  AUTHOR  OF  "HUNGER" 

KNUT  HAMSUN,  like  more  than  one 
other  Norwegian  genius,  won  his 
first  recognition  in  Denmark,  where 
he  spent  a  few  months  after  his  return  from 
the  United  States.  Edvard  Brandes,  at  that 
time  editor  of  the  Copenhagen  daily  "Poli- 
tiken,"  has  told  a  story  of  a  young  Norwe- 
gian who  one  day  presented  himself  at  the 
office  with  a  manuscript.  The  editor  was 
about  to  refuse  it  on  the  ground  of  unsuit- 
able length,  when  something  in  the  appear- 
ance of  the  stranger  made  the  refusal  die  on 
his  lips.  It  was  the  shabbiest,  most  emaci- 
ated figure  that  had  ever  crossed  the  editor- 
ial threshold,  but  there  was  something  in  the 
pale,  trembling  face  and  the  eyes  behind  the 
glasses  that  moved  the  editor  in  spite  of  him- 
self. He  took  the  manuscript  home  with 
him  and  began  to  read  it.  As  he  read  the 
story  of  the  starving  young  genius,  it  dawned 

32 


The  Wanderer 

on  him  with  a  sense  of  shame  that  the  writer 
was  probably  at  that  moment  without  the 
means  of  subsistence.  Hastily  he  enclosed 
a  ten  krone  bill  in  an  envelope,  addressed 
it  to  the  place  the  unknown  author  had  given 
as  his  residence,  and  ran  to  the  station  to  mail 
it.  Then  he  returned  and  read  on  to  the  last 
paragraphs,  where  the  hero  is  stealthily 
crawling  up  to  his  room,  afraid  to  rouse  a 
wrathful  landlady,  and  is  moved  to  a  delir- 
ium of  joy  by  the  receipt  of  a  letter  contain- 
ing a  ten  krone  bill  sent  him  by  an  editor — 
ten  kroner  being  the  highest  pitch  of  opulence 
to  which  Hamsun  ever  carries  his  hero. 

In  telling  the  coincidence  that  same  even- 
ing to  a  Swedish  critic,  Axel  Lundegard, 
who  has  published  the  story,  Brandes  spoke 
of  how  the  manuscript  had  impressed  him. 
"It  was  not  only  that  it  showed  talent.  It 
somehow  caught  one  by  the  throat.  There 
was  about  it  something  of  a  Dostoievsky." 

"Was  it  really  so  remarkable?"  asked 
Lundegard.  "What  was  the  title  of  it?" 

"Hunger." 

"And  the  author?" 

33 


Knut  Hamsun 

"•Knut  Hamsun." 

"It  was  the  first  time  I  heard  the  name 
Knut  Hamsun,"  writes  Lundegard,  and  the 
first  time  I  heard  the  phrase  'something  of  a 
Dostoievsky'  used  about  any  of  his  books. 
Since  then  it  has  become  a  commonplace,  but 
applied  to  the  first  production  of  a  young 
author  by  a  critic  not  at  all  given  to  over-en- 
thusiasm, it  was  a  tribute." 

Through  the  influence  of  Edvard  Brandes 
the  manuscript,  which  contained  the  first 
chapters  of  the  book  "Hunger,"  was  placed 
with  a  new  radical  Copenhagen  magazine, 
"New  Soil."  This  was  in  1888.  The  story 
was  anonymous,  but  it  attracted  attention  by 
its  exotic  brilliance  of  style  and  by  the  intens- 
ity which  up  to  that  time  had  been  unknown  in 
Northern  literature.  Rumors  of  its  author- 
ship were  current,  and  were  confirmed  when, 
in  1890,  the  book  "Hunger"  burst  upon  a 
startled  Christiania  and  made  its  author  in- 
stantly famous. 

In  the  intervening  time  Hamsun  had 
gained  some  notoriety  in  his  own  country  by 
the  publication  of  "Intellectual  Life  in 

34 


The  Wanderer 

Modern  America."  Although  he  had  thus 
trumpeted  forth  his  failure  to  find  any  stir- 
ring of  the  intellect  whatever  in  the  great 
American  republic,  the  Norwegian  critic 
Sigurd  Hoel  attributes  the  style  of  "Hunger" 
to  American  influence.  It  had  a  daredevil 
humor,  a  dash  and  verve,  and  a  feeling  for 
effect  that  certainly  had  no  precedent  in  the 
respectable  annals  of  Norwegian  literature. 
"It  was  the  time  when  I  went  about  and 
starved  in  Christiania,  that  strange  city  which 
no  one  leaves  before  it  has  set  its  mark  upon 
him," — so  runs  the  oft-quoted  first  sentence  in 
"Hunger."  There  is  no  reason  why  it  should 
have  been  Christiania.  It  might  as  well  have 
been  the  American  brain  market,  New  York, 
or  any  other  city  where  men  and  women  try 
to  sell  the  product  of  their  brains  and  learn 
that  their  finest  thoughts  and  highest  efforts 
are  not  of  the  slightest  consequence  to  any- 
body. Hundreds  of  men  and  women  have 
fought  the  fight  to  which  he  has  given  classic 
expression.  They  will  recognize  his  aston- 
ishment as  it  dawned  upon  him  that  although 
he  had  "the  best  brain  in  the  country  and 

35 


Knut  Hamsun 

shoulders  that  could  stop  a  truck,"  there  was 
no  place  for  him  in  the  great  machine  that 
ground  food  for  the  dullest  and  stupidest. 
They  will  know  the  bending  of  the  neck  and 
the  sagging  of  the  spirit,  the  hysterical  swing- 
ing between  absurd  pride  and  shameless 
grasping  .at  any  opportunity,  the  agonized 
striving  to  catch  the  eye  and  ear  of  an  indiffer- 
ent world  by  strained  and  overwrought  work, 
the  impotent  sense  of  never  being  able  to  be- 
gin the  fight  on  equal  terms. 

Few,  however,  have  dared  to  follow  the  ex- 
periment to  the  uttermost  ends  of  destitu- 
tion. Few  have  explored  the  abysses  of  suf- 
fering through  which  Hamsun  leads  his  hero. 
At  one  time  he  tried  to  bully  a  poor  fright- 
ened cashier  into  stealing  five  ore  (a  little 
over  a  cent)  from  the  cash  drawer  so  that  he 
could  buy  bread  with  it.  Another  time  he  re- 
fused the  offer  of  an  editor  to  pay  him  in  ad- 
vance for  an  article  not  yet  written.  Once 
he  suddenly  decided  to  beg  the  price  of  a  little 
food  from  some  big  business  man  whose  name 
had  suddenly  come  into  his  head  with  the 
force  of  an  inspiration,  and  persisted,  humili- 

36 


The  Wanderer 

ating  himself  to  the  depths,  holding  his 
ground  till  he  was  practically  thrown  out. 
Another  time,  when  he  himself  had  starved 
for  days,  he  pawned  his  vest  to  get  a  krone 
to  give  a  beggar.  It  is  just  such  absurdities 
and  inconsistencies  that  people  commit  when 
the  starch  of  everyday  habits  has  been  washed 
out  of  them. 

He  keeps  back  nothing  in  his  story.  He 
even  relates  with  grim  humor  an  encounter 
with  a  girl  of  the  streets  who  in  pity  offers  to 
take  him  home  with  her  although  he  has  no 
money,  while  he  simulates  virtue  to  conceal 
his  abject  state:  "I  am  Pastor  So-and-so. 
Go  away  and  sin  no  more."  But  his  real- 
ism does  not  consist  merely  in  dragging  out 
into  the  light  the  acts  that  others  commit  in 
the  dark.  One  need  not  be  a  genius  to  do 
that.  No,  he  plumbs  below  action,  below  even 
conscious  thought  and  feeling,  to  those  erratic 
impulses  that  would  make  criminals  or  man- 
iacs of  us  all  if  we  followed  them,  not  only 
the  great  overmastering  passions  that  have 
their  place  in  the  Decalogue,  but  all  the  fit- 
ful whims  and  inconsequential  trifles  that  in- 

37 


Knut  Hamsun 

fluence  conduct.  It  is  as  though  the  delir- 
ium of  hunger  had  released  all  that  which  is 
usually  controlled  by  will  or  custom.  Some- 
times, when  he  has  starved  for  days,  he  can 
feel  his  brain  as  it  were  detaching  itself  from 
the  rest  of  his  personality,  going  its  own  way, 
manufacturing  idiotic  conceits,  which  he 
knows  to  be  idiotic,  but  can  not  stop.  Yet 
all  the  time  his  other  consciousness  is  sitting 
by,  holding  the  pulse  of  his  delirious  imagin- 
ation and  recording  its  antics. 

The  light,  whimsical  touch  rarely  fails  him, 
but  occasionally  there  are  passages  of  a  som- 
bre and  thrilling  pathos,  as  the  following: 
"God  had  thrust  His  finger  down  into  the 
tissue  of  my  nerves  and  gently,  quite  casually, 
disarranged  the  fibres  a  little.  And  God  had 
drawn  His  finger  back,  and  behold,  there 
were  shreds  and  fine  root  filaments  on  His 
fingers  from  the  tissue  of  my  nerves.  And 
there  was  an  open  hole  after  the  finger  which 
was  God's  finger  and  wounds  in  my  brain 
where  His  finger  had  passed.  But  when 
God  had  touched  me  with  the  finger  of  His 

38 


HAMSUN  AS  A  YOUNG  MAN 
From  a  Drawing  by  Erik  Werenskiold 


The  Wanderer 

hand,  he  left  me  alone  and  did  not  touch  me 
any  more." 

Once  he  cursed  God.  He  had  begged  a 
bone  of  a  butcher  under  pretense  of  giving  it 
to  his  dog,  and  hid  it  under  his  coat  until  he 
came  to  a  doorway  where  he  could  take  it 
out  and  gnaw  it.  But  the  noxious  bits  came 
up  again  as  fast  as  he  could  swallow  them, 
while  the  tears  streamed  from  his  eyes,  and 
his  whole  body  shook  with  nausea.  Then  he 
screamed  out  his  imprecations:  "I  tell  you, 
you  sacred  Ba'al  of  heaven,  you  do  not  exist, 
but  if  you  did  I  would  curse  you  so  that  your 
heaven  should  tremble  with  the  fires  of  hell. 
I  tell  you,  I  have  offered  you  my  service,  and 
you  have  refused  it,  and  I  turn  my  back  on 
you  forever,  because  you  did  not  know  the 
time  of  your  visitation.  I  tell  you  that  I 
know  I  am  going  to  die,  and  yet  I  scorn  you, 
you  heavenly  Apis,  in  the  teeth  of  death. 
You  have  used  your  power  over  me,  although 
you  know  that  I  never  bend  in  adversity. 
Ought  you  not  to  know  it?  Did  you  form 
my  heart  in  your  sleep?  I  tell  you,  my  whole 

39 


Knut  Hamsun 

life  and  every  drop  of  blood  in  me  rejoices 
in  scorning  you  and  spitting  on  your  grace. 
From  this  moment  I  renounce  you  and  all 
your  works  and  all  your  ways;  I  will  curse  my 
thought  if  it  thinks  of  you  and  tear  off  my  lips 
if  they  ever  again  speak  your  name.  I  say  to 
you,  if  you  exist,  the  last  word  in  life  or  in 
death — I  say  farewell."  But  the  imp  of 
irony,  which  in  Hamsun  is  never  far  away,  is 
peeping  over  his  shoulder  as  he  writes,  and 
the  blasphemies  are  hardly  cold  on  the  page 
before  he  tells  himself  that  they  are  "litera- 
ture." He  is  conscious  of  forming  his  curses 
so  that  they  read  well.  This  outburst  stands 
alone  in  his  works.  It  is  as  though  in  "Hun- 
ger" he  had  once  for  all  rid  himself  of  all  the 
accumulated  rage  and  agony  of  his  youth. 
They  never  come  again. 

The  book  is  without  beginning  and  end  and 
without  a  plot,  but  it  has  a  series  of  climaxes. 
Each  section  describes  some  phase  of  hunger 
and  its  attendant  sufferings:  the  physical  de- 
terioration and  weakness,  the  rebellion  of 
spirit,  the  hallucinations,  the  shame  and  de- 
gradation. When  the  strain  becomes  intol- 

40 


The  Wanderer 

erable,  the  tension  suddenly  snaps  with  the 
receipt  of  five  or  ten  kroner,  and  then  Ham- 
sun instantly  removes  his  hero  from  our  sight. 
We  never  see  him  in  the  enjoyment  of  this 
comparative  opulence,  but  when  the  money  is 
gone,  we  meet  him  again  beginning  the  old 
struggle,  though  each  time  weaker  and  more 
unfit  to  take  up  the  fight.  He  never  achieves 
anything;  his  small  successes  in  occasionally 
selling  a  manuscript  never  lead  to  anything. 
The  book  is  a  record  of  defeat  and  frustration 
which  have  at  last  become  inevitable  because 
something  in  himself  has  given  way.  Even 
his  strange  love  affair  with  the  girl  whom  he 
calls  Ylajali  ends  in  baffled  disappointment. 

Finally  Hamsun  simply  cuts  the  thread  of 
the  story  by  letting  his  hero  ship  as  an  ordi- 
nary seaman  in  a  boat  that  is  going  to  England. 
He  leaves  the  city  he  had  set  out  to  conquer. 
The  city  has  conquered  him.  "Out  in  the 
fjord  I  straightened  up  once  and,  drenched 
with  fever  and  weakness,  looked  in  toward 
land  and  said  good-bye  for  this  time  to  the 
city  of  Christiania,  where  the  windows  shone 
so  brightly  in  all  the  homes." 

41 


THE  POET 


THE  POET 

HIS  OWN  HERO 

THE  most  adequate  idea  of  Hamsun's 
artistic  personality  can  be  gained  by 
reading  his  early  works  from  "Hun- 
ger" to  "Munken  Vendt"  and  preferably  read- 
ing them  in  the  order  of  their  appearance. 
Through  the  medley  of  characters  there 
emerges  a  distinct  type  that  can  be  traced  in 
one  after  the  other  of  his  early  books  but  dis- 
appears in  the  later,  more  objective,  pictures 
of  whole  communities.  This  person  is  at  first 
always  the  hero  in  whom  everything  cen- 
tres; later  he  steps  into  the  background  as 
an  onlooker  who  is  sometimes  the  author's 
spokesman.  He  is  always  a  dreamer  and  one 
who  stands  outside  of  organized  society;  but 
this  aloofness  is  not  self-sought.  On  the  con- 
trary, he  often  suffers  in  his  loneliness,  and  is 
longing  and  struggling  to  come  within  the 
circle  of  human  fellowship,  but  there  is  some- 

45 


Knut  Hamsun 

thing  in  his  own  nature  which  unfits  him  to  be 
a  cog  in  the  common  machinery.  His  pulses 
are  differently  attuned  from  those  of  other 
people.  The  standards  by  which  happiness 
and  success  are  usually  measured  mean  noth- 
ing to  him,  but  he  can  be  lifted  to  exaltation 
by  the  fragrance  of  a  flower  or  the  humming 
of  an  insect.  He  is  often  a  poet,  if  not  in  ac- 
tual production  at  least  in  his  temperament, 
and  has  the  poet's  responsiveness  to  things 
that  more  thick-skinned  people  do  not  notice. 
An  ugly  face,  a  jarring  noise  can  shiver  his 
highest  mood  like  crystal  and  plunge  him  to 
the  depths  of  despair.  A  sour  look  or  an  un- 
kind word  or  even  a  trifling  mishap — the 
loss  of  a  lead  pencil  when  he  is  inspired  to 
write — can  cast  a  gloom  over  his  day.  He  is 
full  of  generous  impulses  which  sometimes 
take  erratic  forms  and  is  capable  of  carrying 
self-sacrifice  to  the  most  senseless  extreme,  but 
his  nature  has  never  a  drop  of  meanness.  He 
revels  in  communing  with  nature  and  finds 
pleasure  in  the  society  of  some  lowly  friend 
or  simple,  loving  woman,  but  any  happiness 
that  life  may  bring  him  is  never  more  than  a 


The  Poet 

momentary  gleam.  He  never  lives  to  his  full 
potentiality  either  in  achievement  or  in  pas- 
sion. The  Swedish  critic  John  Landquist 
puts  the  question  why  we  never  tire  of  this 
oft-repeated  Hamsun  hero  any  more  than  of 
his  Swedish  cousin  Gosta  Berling,  and  an- 
swers that  it  is  because  he  never  gains  any- 
thing and  never  turns  any  situation  to  his 
own  advantage. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  this  constantly  re- 
curring figure  is  Hamsun  himself  in  one  in- 
carnation after  another.  He  has  pointed  the 
connection  by  personal  description,  by  refer- 
ence to  his  authorship,  and  once  even  by  the 
use  of  his  own  name.  He  has  to  a  greater  ex- 
tent than  most  creative  artists  drawn  for  his 
subjects  on  his  own  varied  experiences,  and 
though  he  has  of  course  transmuted  them  in 
his  imagination,  it  is  clear  that  he  has  at 
least  been  near  enough  to  the  events  he  re- 
cords to  have  lived  through  them  very  in- 
tensely in  his  own  mind.  This  is,  of  course, 
notably  true  of  "Hunger,"  which  was  written 
at  the  age  of  thirty,  when  his  own  experiences 
as  a  journalistic  free  lance  in  Christiania  were 

47 


Knut  Hamsun 

still  fresh  in  his  mind.  It  is  true  also  of  "Mys- 
teries," "Pan,"  and  "Victoria,"  each  one  of 
which  corresponds  to  some  phase  in  his 
own  development.  In  "Munken  Vendt"  and 
"Wanderers"  there  are  reminiscences  from  his 
vagabond  days,  and  it  is  significant  of  the  sub- 
jectivity with  which  he  enters  into  the  person 
of  his  hero  that  in  the  latter  he  has  chosen  to 
make  the  narrator  a  man  of  his  own  age  at  the 
time  of  writing  rather  than  reincarnate  him- 
self in  the  image  of  his  youth.  In  the  earlier 
books,  on  the  other  hand,  the  hero  is  always 
young,  generally  between  twenty-five  and 
and  thirty. 

The  Hamsun  ego  as  the  critic  of  contem- 
porary phenomena,  the  outsider  who  is  unable 
to  fit  himself  into  any  clique  or  party,  appears 
in  Hoibro  of  "Editor  Lynge,"  who  is  carried 
over  into  the  drama  "Sunset,"  and  in  Coldevin 
of  "Shallow  Soil."  He  is  absent  from  all 
the  author's  later,  more  objective,  novels, 
"Dreamers,"  "Benoni,"  "Rosa,"  "Children  of 
the  Age,"  "Segelfoss  City,"  and  "Women  at 
the  Pump,"  but  we  may  perhaps  find  a  sha- 
dow of  him  in  Sheriff  Geissler  of  "Growth  of 


The  Poet 

the  Soil,"  the  garrulous  wiseacre  who  "knew 
what  was  right,  but  did  not  do  it." 

The  typical  traits  of  the  young  Hamsun 
hero  are  found  in  the  highest  degree  in  Johan 
Nagel.  The  central  figure  of  "Mysteries" 
(1892)  is  a  reincarnation  of  the  nameless  nar- 
rator of  "Hunger,"  a  few  years  older,  gentler, 
but  no  less  erratic,  and  even  more  sensitive. 
There  is  about  him  a  great  lassitude,  an  indif- 
ference to  his  own  advancement  in  life, 
which  might  easily  be  the  aftermath  of  great 
suffering  and  terrible  struggles.  He  seems 
to  have  no  purpose  of  any  kind.  He  steps 
ashore  one  day  in  a  small  Norwegian  seacoast 
town  simply  because  it  looks  so  pleasant  to  a 
returned  wanderer,  and  there  he  remains, 
startling  the  inhabitants  by  his  odd  manners 
and  freakish  garments.  There  is  an  ex- 
quisite goodness  in  Nagel.  His  attitude 
is  no  longer  that  of  the  clenched  fist. 
He  tries  to  win  his  way  into  the  fel- 
lowship of  his  neighbors  by  acts  of  quixo- 
tic generosity — which  another  impulse  leads 
him  to  cover  up.  He  takes  infinites  pains 
to  find  opportunities  of  giving  pleasure  to  the 

49 


Knut  Hamsun 

outcasts  of  the  community  without  letting 
them  know  whence  the  bounty  comes.  He 
loves  to  decoy  a  beggar  into  a  doorway  and 
bestow  a  large  sum  upon  him  with  strict  in- 
junctions to  secrecy.  He  has  in  the  highest 
degree  the  sweetness  and  longing  for  affec- 
tion which  is  a  leading  trait  in  all  the  Ham- 
sun heroes,  though  least  apparent  in  the 
youngest  of  them,  the  narrator  of  "Hunger;" 
but  he  has  also  in  a  superlative  degree  their 
unfitness  for  the  common  affairs  of  men. 
Consequently  he  suffers  the  fate  of  those  who 
would  do  good  as  it  were  from  the  outside 
without  being  a  part  of  the  community  for 
which  they  would  sacrifice  themselves:  his 
efforts  fall  fruitless  to  the  ground. 

Into  this  book  Hamsun  has  introduced  a 
curious  parody  of  the  hero,  a  little  wizened 
cripple  who  is  like  a  deformed  reflection  of 
Nagel.  This  poor  devil  carries  goodness, 
meekness,  and  long-suffering  to  a  point  where 
it  merely  rouses  the  beast  in  the  respectable 
citizens  of  the  small  town  and  draws  on  him- 
self brutal  persecution;  but  underneath  his 
real  goodness  there  is  some  abyss  of  evil  which 

50 


The  Poet 

we  are  not  allowed  to  fathom,  but  which 
Nagel  understands  by  a  strange  intuition. 
His  efforts  to  warn  and  save  his  protege  are 
unavailing.  Unsuccessful  too  are  his  efforts 
to  win  the  confidence  of  Martha  Gude  to 
whom  he  turns  for  consolation  when  Dagny 
rejects  his  love.  Nagel  is  an  artist  nature, 
and  in  the  latter  part  of  the  book  he  is  re- 
vealed as  a  violinist  with  at  least  a  touch  of 
real  genius,  but  he  has  been  thoroughly  disil- 
lusioned regarding  himself  and  his  art.  He 
will  not  be  one  of  the  swarm  of  little  geniuses 
or  cater  to  the  beef-eaters.  Whatever  pos- 
sibilities of  achievement  still  lie  dormant  in 
him  are  completely  destroyed  by  his  unhappy 
love  affair. 

Written  at  a  time  when  Hamsun  from  the 
lecture  platform  was  carrying  on  a  campaign 
against  the  older  poets  and  the  established 
literary  standards,  "Mysteries"  is  made  the  ve- 
hicle of  many  iconoclastic  opinions,  and 
Nagel  is  to  a  greater  extent  than  most  of  his 
heroes  made  the  mouthpiece  of  the  author's 
views.  In  long  rambling  talks,  sometimes 
carried  on  with  himself  as  sole  audience,  he 


Knut  Hamsun 

attacks  Ibsen,  Tolstoy,  Gladstone,  and  other 
great  names  of  the  day.  In  the  books  im- 
mediately following  "Mysteries,"  "Editor 
Lynge"  and  "Shallow  Soil,"  Hamsun  con- 
tinues his  attacks  on  the  ideals  of  the  day, 
though  in  them  he  directs  his  blows  rather  at 
the  small- imitators  of  the  great. 

The  Hamsun  hero  in  his  relation  to  na- 
ture appears  in  "Pan"  (1894).  Lieutenant 
Glahn,  the  central  figure  of  the  book,  is  a 
hunter  who  has  lived  in  the  forest  until  he  has 
himself  taken  on  something  of  the  nature  of 
an  animal  in  the  look  of  his  eyes  and  in  his 
manner  of  moving.  He  is  supremely  happy 
in  his  hut.  His  senses  are  saturated  with  the 
warmth  of  summer  days,  the  fragrance  of 
roots  and  trees,  the  soughing  of  the  woods, 
and  the  tiny  noises  of  all  the  things  that  live 
in  the  forest.  His  spirit  rests  in  the  sense  that 
in  nature  all  things  go  on,  tiny  streamlets 
trickle  their  melodies  against  the  mountain- 
side though  no  one  hears  them,  the  brook 
rushes  to  the  ocean,  and  everything  is  renewed 
each  year  regardless  of  human  fates.  With 
the  outdoor  life  comes  the  primitive  love  of 

52 


The  Poet 

shelter  which  we  lose  in  cities ;  a  warm  sense 
of  home  ripples  through  his  whole  being 
when  he  returns  to  his  hut  in  the  evening,  and 
he  talks  to  his  dog  about  how  comfortable 
they  are. 

Glahn  has  found  peace  in  the  forest,  but 
this  peace  is  shattered  as  soon  as  he  comes  in 
contact  with  his  fellowmen.  Awkward  and 
uncouth,  he  is  unable  to  comport  himself  with 
dignity  even  in  the  little  group  of  merchants 
and  professional  men  that  constitute  society 
in  a  Nordland  fishing  village.  He  is  too 
proud  and  simple  to  cope  with  the  caprices 
of  the  woman  he  has  fallen  in  love  with,  and 
she  soon  tires  of  him.  Then  Glahn,  moved 
by  a  childish  desire  to  make  her  feel  his  ex- 
istence even  though  it  be  only  by  a  big  noise, 
arranges  a  rock  explosion,  and  this  foolish 
feat  accidently  kills  the  only  person  who 
really  loves  him,  the  simple  woman  whom  he 
has  met  in  the  forest.  Against  his  misery  now 
nature,  which  a  few  weeks  earlier  was  all  in 
all  to  him,  has  no  remedy. 

Between  the  appearance  of  "Pan"  and  "Vic- 
toria" (1898)  lay  a  period  of  productive  work 

53 


Knut  Hamsun 

resulting  in  the  publication  of  the  dramatic 
trilogy  centering  in  the  philosopher  Kareno 
and  a  volume  of  short  stories  entitled  "Siesta." 
The  increasing  success  of  Hamsun's  own  au- 
thorship set  its  stamp  on  the  next  incarnation 
of  his  hero,  Johannes,  the  miller's  son  in  "Vic- 
toria" who  becomes  a  poet.  Johannes  is  the 
only  one  of  all  his  youthful  heroes  who  is  fun- 
damentally a  harmonious  nature  and  the  only 
one  who  masters  life.  The  opening  para- 
graph of  the  book  is  like  a  happier  reflection 
of  Hamsun's  own  dreamy,  lonely  boyhood. 
"The  miller's  son  went  around  and  thought. 
He  was  a  big  fellow  of  fourteen  years,  brown 
from  sun  and  wind  and  full  of  ideas.  When 
he  was  grown  up  he  was  going  to  be  a  match 
manufacturer.  That  was  so  deliciously  dan- 
gerous, he  might  get  sulphur  on  his  fingers  so 
that  no  one  would  dare  to  shake  hands  with 
him.  He  would  be  very  much  respected  by 
the  other  boys  because  of  his  dangerous  trade." 
Johannes  knows  all  the  birds  and  is  like  "a 
little  father"  to  the  trees,  lifting  up  their 
branches  when  they  are  weighed  down  by 
snow.  He  preaches  to  a  congregation  of 

54 


The  Poet 

boulders  in  the  old  granite  quarry,  and  stands 
dreaming  over  the  mill  dam,  following  the 
course  of  the  bubbles  as  they  burst  in  foam. 
"When  he  was  grown  up  he  was  going  to  be  a 
diver,  that's  what  he  was  going  to  be.  Then 
he  would  step  down  into  the  ocean  from  the 
deck  of  a  ship  and  enter  strange  kingdoms 
and  lands  where  marvellous  forests  were  wav- 
ing, and  a  castle  of  coral  stood  on  the  bottom. 
And  the  princess  beckons  to  him  from  a  win- 
dow and  says,  'Come  in!' ' 

Just  as  Hamsun's  own  dreams  are  echoed 
in  this  boyish  imagery,  so  his  own  authorship 
in  its  happiest  time  when  he  felt  all  his 
powers  in  full  swing,  is  reflected  in  the  later 
story  of  Johannes.  Between  the  rude  hunter 
of  "Pan"  and  the  poet  of  "Victoria"  there  is  a 
lifetime  of  development.  Johannes  is  just  as 
impulsive  and  irrepressible  as  the  other  Ham- 
sun heroes;  he  is  quite  likely  to  burst  into  loud 
song  in  the  middle  of  the  night  and  disturb 
the  neighbors,  if  a  happy  idea  strikes  him, 
but  he  has  really  found  himself  in  his  work. 
Johannes  is  loved  by  the  young  lady  of  the 
manor  with  a  love  that  is  strong  enough  for 

55 


Knut  Hamsun 

death,  but  not  strong  enough  for  life.  He 
loses  her,  but  the  loss  does  not  blight  his  life. 
The  great  emotion  she  has  given  him  remains 
with  him  to  deepen  and  enrich  his  nature  and 
to  become  the  life-sap  of  his  blossoming  gen- 
ius. 

Very  different  from  the  miller's  son  and 
yet  of  the  same  family  is  the  happy-go-lucky 
swain  who  gives  his  name  to  the  dramatic 
poem  "Munken  Vendt"  (1902).  It  is  to  some 
degree  reminiscent  of  "Peer  Gynt"  both  in  the 
verse  form  and  in  the  chief  character;  but 
while  Ibsen  wrote  a  bloody  satire  of  the  worst 
qualities  in  his  race,  Hamsun  has  drawn  a 
lovable  vagabond.  Munken  Vendt  is  a 
student  and  hunter  whose  adventures  take 
place  in  some  Norwegian  valley  at  a  period 
not  definitely  fixed,  but  certainly  much  more 
romantic  than  the  present.  He  is  something 
of  a  poet,  is  clever  but  unable  to  turn  his  gifts 
to  his  own  advantage,  is  clothed  in  rags  but 
always  with  a  feather  in  his  cap  and  ready  to 
give  away  his  last  shirt,  wins  sweethearts 
wherever  he  goes  but  fails  the  woman  who 
should  have  been  his  mate,  and  finally  throws 

56 


The  Poet 

away  his  life  in  a  senseless  extravagance  of 
self-sacrifice.  There  is  about  Munken  Vendt, 
for  all  his  foolishness,  a  proud  defiance  of 
suffering,  a  noble  pathos,  a  bigness  and  ele- 
vation of  thought,  which  give  his  portrait  a 
distinctive  place  in  the  Hamsun  gallery. 

The  books  I  have  mentioned  here  are  gen- 
erally regarded  as  the  most  individualistic  of 
Hamsun's  works  and  as  those  that  reveal  his 
personality  most  intimately.  Among  them 
should  be  counted  also  "The  Wild  Chorus" 
(1904),  a  slender  volume  of  poems  which, 
with  "Munken  Vendt,"  constitute  all  that  he 
has  written  in  metrical  form.  While  Ham- 
sun is  most  at  home  in  poetic  prose,  his  poems 
have  a  wild,  fresh  charm  and  are  intensely 
personal  expressions  of  his  views  on  the  two 
subjects  that  engage  him  most  deeply:  love 
between  man  and  woman  and  love  of  nature. 


THE   HERO  AND  THE  HEROINE 

A  VERITABLE  Shakespearean  gal- 
Jery  of  women,  drawn  with  subtle  in- 
sight and  delicate  sympathy,  is  found 
in  Hamsun's  works.  Though  infinitely  va- 
ried in  their  personalities,  they  move  within 
certain  limits  and  have  certain  traits  in  com- 
mon. They  are  intensely  feminine  with  the 
nervous  fitfulness  and  spasmodic  capricious- 
ness  that  go  with  overwrought  sexual  sensi- 
bilities. Occasionally  he  carries  a  woman 
through  this  phase  in  her  life  into  a  warm 
and  passionate  motherliness,  but  never  into  a 
finer  and  more  complex  individual  develop- 
ment. All  his  heroines  have  in  the  highest 
degree  the  unfathomable  lure  of  sex,  but  what 
they  are  above  and  beyond  this  we  never 
learn. 

The  limitation  may  be  less  in  the  heroines 
themselves  than  in  the  medium  through 
which  we  are  allowed  to  see  them.  If  it  were 


The  Poet 

possible  to  mention  in  the  same  breath  two 
such  antipodes  as  Jane  Austen  and  Knut 
Hamsun,  I  might  recall  what  has  been  said  of 
her  that  she  never  attempts  to  tell  us  how 
men  talk  when  they  are  away  from  the  pres- 
ence of  women.  He  never  describes  a  woman 
when  she  is  alone.  We  are  never  allowed  to 
be  present  when  his  heroines  commune  with 
their  own  thoughts;  we  never  see  them  from 
their  own  point  of  view  and  but  rarely  from 
that  of  a  mere  observer.  We  glimpse  only 
so  much  of  them  as  they  reveal  to  their  lovers, 
and  while  in  this  way  they  never  lose  the 
glamour  and  mystery  with  which  they  are  sur- 
rounded, it  is  inevitable  that  they  will  seem 
members  of  a  common  sisterhood,  inasmuch 
as  their  lover,  the  Hamsun  hero,  is  always  the 
same. 

In  the  character  of  Edvarda  in  "Pan"  the 
qualities  of  the  Hamsun  heroine  are  heavily 
underscored.  She  is  a  wayward  girl  with 
erotic  instincts  early  awakened  and  with  a 
flighty  imagination  which  sets  her  lovers  ab- 
surd tasks,  and  yet  there  is  a  certain  sweetness 
and  a  primitive  freshness  about  her  that  at- 

59 


Knut  Hamsun 

tract  in  spite  of  better  judgment.  Her  curi- 
osity is  roused  by  Glahn,  the  hunter  with  the 
"eyes  like  an  animal's";  she  invites  him  to 
her  father's  house  and  draws  him  into  their 
social  circle.  At  a  picnic  she  suddenly  flies 
at  him  and  kisses  him  in  the  presence  of  the 
assembled  village,  and  after  this  outburst  she 
meets  him  constantly,  circles  around  his  hut 
by  night,  and  kisses  his  very  footprints.  But 
in  a  few  days  her  violence  has  exhausted  it- 
self; she  stays  away  from  their  trysts;  she 
insults  and  ridicules  him  in  her  own  home  as 
publicly  as  she  has  formerly  favored  him, 
and  before  many  weeks  have  passed,  she  has 
engaged  herself  to  another  man.  Yet  her  love 
for  Glahn  is  real,  and  presently  she  makes 
frantic  attempts  to  get  him  back.  Glahn's 
stubborn  resistance  is  the  measure  of  the  suf- 
fering she  has  inflicted  upon  him,  and  when 
at  last  she  begs  him  to  leave  his  dog  ^sop 
with  her  when  he  departs,  he  shoots  his  four- 
footed  friend  and  sends  her  the  body.  He 
seeks  consolation  with  other  women,  and  there 
is  much  sweetness  in  his  relation  with  Eva, 
the  simple  daughter  of  the  people,  but  in 

60 


The  Poet 

spite  of  her  humble,  unquestioning  devotion 
and  his  real  tenderness  for  her,  his  feeling 
never  touches  the  heights  or  the  depths.  Even 
when  he  is  with  her,  the  thought  of  Edvarda  is 
like  a  constantly  smarting  wound.  Yet  he  con- 
tinues to  resist  Edvarda's  advances.  When 
after  the  lapse  of  some  years  she  tries  to  call 
him  back,  he  pretends  to  himself  that  he  does 
not  care,  but  he  goes  away  to  the  Indian  jungle 
and  seeks  death. 

Edvarda  reappears  in  a  subsequent  novel 
"Rosa,"  a  torn  and  lacerated  soul,  forever  un- 
satisfied, with  strange  gleams  of  generosity 
alternating  with  petty  cruelty.  She  owns 
that  there  have  been  some  moments  in  life 
not  so  bad  as  others,  and  chief  among  these 
to  her  was  the  time  when  she  was  in  love  with 
the  strange  hunter.  In  her  desperate  long- 
ing for  something  that  will  take  her  out  of 
herself,  she  has  spasms  of  religion,  but  at  last 
sinks  to  the  level  of  having  an  erotic  adven- 
ture with  a  Lapp  in  the  forest  and  worship- 
ping his  hideous  little  stone  god. 

A  repellent  creature  in  many  ways  is  Ed- 
varda, and  yet  the  author  has  managed  to 

61 


Knut  Hamsun 

make  us  feel  her  through  the  perceptions  of 
her  lover,  who  sees — shall  we  say  a  figment 
of  his  imagination  or  the  real  Edvarda?  Be- 
hind her  flagrant  coquetries  he  discerns  a 
fount  of  purity:  "She  has  such  chaste  hands." 
Her  girlish  affectations,  even  her  clumsiness, 
have  for  him  a  kind  of  appeal  as  of  something 
naive  and  helpless.  Glahn  and  Edvarda  are 
both  essentially  and  deeply  primitive  though 
afflicted  with  a  blight  of  sophistication.  Each 
answers  to  a  profound  need  in  the  other;  each 
has  for  the  other  that  one  supreme  thing 
which  is  higher  and  deeper  than  virtue  and 
wisdom  and  which  no  one  can  give  in  its  full 
intensity  to  more  than  one  person  out  of  the 
world  of  men  and  women.  Both  know  that  it 
is  so,  and  yet  something  in  themselves  pre- 
vents them  from  giving  and  receiving  that 
which  both  long  for  with  undying  fervor. 
Glahn's  passion  is  strong  enough  to  ruin  his 
life,  but  it  is  after  all  not  strong  enough  to 
hold  fast  through  good  and  bad,  in  happi- 
ness and  unhappiness,  and  win  from  the  rela- 
tion the  fullness  of  life  which  no  one  but  Ed- 
varda could  give  him.  The  conflict  of  love 

62 


The  Poet 

which  Hamsun  so  often  describes  is  here 
present  in  the  most  clearcut  form  because 
there  is  nothing  outwardly  to  divide  the  lov- 
ers. Their  tragedy  is  entirely  of  their  own 
making. 

Dagny  in  ''Mysteries"  is  superficially  a 
much  more  attractive  young  woman  than 
Edvarda.  She  is  the  clergyman's  daughter, 
sweet  and  blithe,  with  a  big  blond  braid 
and  a  habit  of  blushing  when  she  speaks.  All 
the  village  loves  her,  and  we  can  easily 
imagine  her  visiting  the  sick  and  befriend- 
ing the  poor.  But  Dagny  is  a  far  more  invet- 
erate coquette  than  Edvarda.  While  Ed- 
varda was  moved  by  her  own  thirst  for  excite- 
ment and  longed  rather  to  be  herself  subju- 
gated than  to  subjugate  others,  Dagny  is  a 
deliberate  flirt  who  can  not  bring  herself  to 
release  any  man  once  she  has  him  in  her 
power.  Whether  she  loves  Nagel  or  not  he 
does  not  know,  nor  does  the  reader.  She 
weakens  for  a  moment  under  the  force  of 
his  passion,  but  she  holds  fast  to  her  purpose  of 
marrying  her  handsome  and  wealthy  fiance, 
although  she  intrigues  to  prevent  Martha 

63 


Knut  Hamsun 

Gude  from  giving  Nagel  what  she  herself 
withholds.  That  his  death  for  her  sake 
shakes  her  nature  to  its  depths  we  learn 
when  we  meet  her  again  in  "Editor  Lynge," 
where  she  owns  to  herself  that  at  one  word 
more  she  would  have  given  up  everything 
and  thrown  herself  on  his  breast. 

This  one  word  Nagel  never  speaks.  Like 
the  hero  of  "Pan"  he  seeks  the  haven  of  an- 
other woman's  tenderness.  He  yearns  toward 
Martha  Gude  with  all  his  heart,  longs  for 
the  peace  and  rest  and  purity  she  could  have 
brought  into  his  life,  and  yet  he  can  not  tear 
himself  lose  from  the  passion  that  binds  his 
soul  and  senses.  Even  while  he  is  pleading 
with  Martha  and  tries  to  win  her  confidence 
in  a  scene  drawn  with  tender  delicacy,  his 
thoughts  are  with  Dagny,  and  when  at  last 
he  has  won  Martha's  shy  promise,  he  rushes 
out  into  the  night  to  whisper  Dagny's  name 
to  the  trees  and  the  earth.  The  love  which 
gushes  forth  irrepressibly  from  some  un- 
quenchable fountain  in  the  soul,  which  wells 
out  again  and  again,  warm  and  fresh,  how- 
ever often  its  outlet  is  clogged  and  muddied, 


The  Poet 

this  love  Hamsun  has  often  pictured  and 
seldom  with  more  tragic  force  than  in  the 
unhappy  hero  of  "Mysteries."  And  yet,  great 
and  real  as  his  love  is — great  and  real 
enough  to  send  him  to  his  death — it  is  not 
perfect.  It  is  poisoned  by  a  lingering  doubt, 
which  prevents  him  from  putting  forth  the 
one  last  effort  that  would  have  broken  down 
Dagny's  resistance. 

The  lovers  in  Hamsun's  books  are  never  at 
peace.  They  never  know  the  quiet,  gradual 
opening  of  heart  to  heart  or  the  intimate 
communion  of  perfect  sympathy.  With  them 
the  conflict  always  goes  on.  Gunnar  Hei- 
berg,  the  Norwegian  dramatist,  has  said  that 
there  is  no  such  thing  as  mutual  love,  be- 
cause no  two  people  ever  love  each  other 
simultaneously.  When  one  has  grown  warm, 
the  other  has  grown  cold ;  and  when  one  ad- 
vances, the  other  instinctively  recoils.  With 
Hamsun  the  conflict  is  more  fine-spun  than 
that  which  Heiberg  has  painted  rather  crassly. 
The  mutual  love  is  there,  but  it  is  a  thing  so 
wild  and  shy  and  sensitive  that  it  shrinks  back 
into  the  dark  at  a  touch  even  from  the  hand  of 

65 


Knut  Hamsun 

the  beloved.  Or  is  perhaps  the  human  soul 
so  jealous  of  its  freedom  that  it  reacts  against 
having  another  individuality  fasten  upon  it 
even  in  love? 

It  is  these  intangible  forces  rather  than  the 
outer  facts  that  divide  the  lovers  in  "Victoria." 
Victoria  is  the  patrician  among  Hamsun's 
heroines,  not  only  because  of  her  birth  and 
breeding,  but  by  virtue  of  her  character.  She 
is  far  too  noble  for  deliberate  coquetry,  and 
yet  she  tortures  Johannes  by  an  apparent  ca- 
priciousness  that  seems  out  of  keeping  with 
her  frank,  generous  nature,  while  he  answers 
with  coldness  and  hauteur.  Why?  Victoria 
has  the  secret,  agonizing  consciousness  of  the 
promise  she  has  given  her  father  that  she 
would  marry  a  wealthy  suitor  who  can  re- 
trieve the  fallen  fortunes  of  the  family. 
Johannes  feels  his  own  humble  birth  and  his 
distance  from  the  princess  of  his  dreams.  Yet 
these  reasons  seem  hardly  sufficient.  It  is 
difficult  to  imagine  that  battered  old  aristo- 
crat, Victoria's  father,  forcing  his  daughter 
into  an  unhappy  marriage  to  save  his  home, 
still  more  difficult  to  picture  the  mother,  who 

66 


The  Poet 

knows  everything ,  leading  her  daughter  to 
the  sacrifice.  Moreover,  Johannes,  though 
of  humble  birth,  has  won  fame  and  has  de- 
veloped into  a  man  of  substantive  personality. 
He  is  not  only  Victoria's  lover  but  her 
playmate  and  oldest  friend  and  a  favorite  of 
her  parents.  In  fact  the  sweetness  in  the  re- 
lation between  cottage  and  manor  is  one  of 
the  things  that  entitle  "Victoria"  to  its  reputa- 
tion as  the  most  idyllic  among  its  auth- 
or's works.  Why  then  do  not  these  four 
people  face  the  situation  together?  Why 
does  not  at  least  Victoria  talk  it  over  with 
her  lover?  Afterwards  she  writes  that  she 
has  been  hindered  by  many  things  but  most 
by  her  own  nature  which  leads  her  to  be 
cruel  to  herself.  But  the  real  reason  is  that 
Hamsun's  art  at  this  stage  of  his  devel- 
opment has  no  use  for  fulfillment.  With 
fulfillment  comes  indifference.  It  is  his  to 
paint  the  unslaked  thirst  and  the  unstilled 
longing.  Therefore  the  wonderful  letter  in 
which  Victoria  lays  bare  her  heart  is  not  sent 
until  after  her  death,  and  therefore  she 
leaves  Johannes  the  legacy  of  a  great  tragic 


Knut  Hamsun 

feeling  which  is  forever  alive  and  throbbing 
because  it  is  forever  unsatisfied. 

Mariane  Holmengraa  in  "Segelfoss  City" 
belongs  with  Hamsun's  young  heroines.  She 
has  some  traits  both  of  Edvarda  and  of  Vic- 
toria. But  in  this  much  later  book  the  author 
has  begu-n  to  take  a  godfatherly  attitude 
toward  his  young  hero  and  heroine;  their 
sparring  is  playful  rather  than  tragic,  and  he 
leaves  them  at  the  entrance  to  what  promises 
to  be  a  happy-ever-afterwards. 

In  "Munken  Vendt"  the  man's  waywardness 
and  the  woman's  pride  divide  the  two  who 
should  have  belonged  to  each  other.  When 
Iselin,  the  great  lady  of  Os,  stoops  to  befriend 
the  vagabond  student,  he  tells  her  brutally 
that  he  has  no  use  for  her  kindness  and  does 
not  love  her.  Many  years  later,  when  he  re- 
turns after  a  long  absence,  he  again  rejects  her 
advances.  In  revenge  Iselin  orders  him  to 
be  bound  to  a  tree  with  uplifted  arms  until 
the  seed  in  his  hand  has  sprouted.  Munken 
Vendt  bears  the  torture  without  a  murmur 
and  curses  those  who  would  release  him  be- 
fore she  gives  the  word,  but  his  hands  are  crip- 

68 


The  Poet 

pled  by  the  ordeal,  and,  partly  in  consequence 
of  his  helplessness,  he  meets  death  not  long 
after  by  an  accident.  Then  Iselin  walks  back- 
ward over  the  edge  of  a  pier  and  is  drowned. 
Here  the  conflict,  which  appears  more  veiled 
in  Hamsun's  other  books,  is  clearly  expressed 
in  terms  of  savage,  impulsive  actions  possible 
only  in  a  primitive  state  of  society. 

A  relation  of  perfect  trust  and  harmony  is 
that  of  Isak  and  Inger  in  "Growth  of  the 
Soil."  From  their  elemental  community  of 
interest  develops  a  really  beautiful  affection, 
which  Inger's  straying  from  the  straight  path 
can  not  long  disturb.  It  is  almost  as  though 
the  author  would  say:  So  simple  and  so  prim- 
itive must  people  be  in  order  to  make  a  success 
of  marriage;  for  the  complex  and  the  sophis- 
ticated there  is  no  such  thing  as  happiness  in 
love.  A  similar  lesson  might  be  drawn  from 
"The  Last  Joy"  where  Ingeborg  Torsen,  a 
teacher,  after  various  adventures,  marries  a 
peasant  and  becomes  happy  in  sharing  his 
humble  work  and  bearing  his  children. 

The  rebellion  of  a  man  against  the  monot- 
ony of  marriage  has  been  presented  again  and 


Knut  Hamsun 

again  by  writers  great  and  small  from  every 
possible  angle.  The  inner  revolt  of  a 
woman  against  the  concrete  fact  of  marriage, 
even  with  the  man  she  has  herself  chosen,  has 
not  often  been  pictured,  and  rarely  with  the 
sympathetic  divination  that  Hamsun  brings 
to  bear  on  the  subject.  Puzzling  and  contra- 
dictory, but  very  interesting  is,  for  instance, 
Fru  Adelheid  in  "Children  of  the  Age."  She 
is  a  woman  with  a  cold  manner  but  with  a 
warmth  of  temperament  revealed  only  in  her 
voice.  At  'first  we  do  not  know  whether  she 
is  attracted  to  her  husband  or  repelled  by  him 
until  she  reveals  that  she  has  simply  reacted 
against  his  air  of  possession.  Her  husband, 
the  "lieutenant"  of  Segelfoss  manor,  knows 
that  his  wife  has  enthralled  his  soul  and  senses 
and  that  no  other  woman  can  mean  anything  to 
him,  but  he  can  not  bring  himself  to  try  to 
patch  up  what  has  been  broken.  Here  we 
have  the  conflict  between  two  people  of  ma- 
turer  years  who  wake  up  one  day  to  the  reali- 
zation that  it  is  too  late.  Life  has  passed  them 
by  and  can  never  be  recaptured. 

In  "Wanderers"  the  distintegrating  influ- 
70 


The  Poet 

ence  in  the  marriage  of  the  Falkenbergs  is 
habit  that  breeds  indifference,  and  Fru 
Falkenberg,  one  of  Hamsun's  most  poignantly 
beautiful  and  most  unhappy  heroines,  is  of 
too  fine  a  caliber  to  survive  the  bruise  to  her 
self-respect.  In  "Shallow  Soil"  Hanka  Tide- 
mand  is  drawn  by  the  false  glamour  of  genius 
which  surrounds  the  poet  Irgens,  and  regards 
her  husband  as  nothing  but  a  commonplace 
business  man.  Here,  however,  the  strength 
and  depth  of  the  man's  love  saves  the  situation. 
In  its  happy  ending  their  story  is  unique 
among  the  author's  earlier  works. 

Among  his  many  wayward  heroines  Ham- 
sun has  painted  one  woman  of  calm  and  benig- 
nant steadfastness,  Rosa,  the  heroine  of  the  two 
Nordland  novels,  "Benoni"  and  "Rosa."  She 
is  so  deeply  and  innately  faithful  that  she  not 
only  clings  for  many  years  to  her  worthless 
fiance  and  finally  marries  him,  but  even  after 
she  has  been  forced  to  divorce  him  and  has 
been  told  he  is  dead,  she  feels  that  she  can 
"never  be  unmarried  from"  the  man  whose 
wife  she  has  once  been.  It  is  only  after  he  is 
really  dead  and  after  her  child  is  born  that  she 


Knut  Hamsun 

can  be  content  in  her  marriage  with  her  de- 
voted old  suitor,  Benoni.  Then  the  mother 
instinct,  which  is  her  strongest  characteristic, 
awakens  and  enfolds  not  only  her  child  but 
her  child's  father.  Quite  alone  in  the  sister- 
hood of  Hamsun  heroines  stands  Martha 
Gude,  a  spinster  of  forty  with  white  hair  and 
young  eyes  and  a  child  heart.  Her  goodness 
and  her  purity,  which  has  the  dewy  freshness 
of  morning,  draw  Nagel  to  her,  although  she 
is  twelve  years  older  than  he. 

Side  by  side  and  often  intermingled  with 
the  ethereal  delicacy  of  his  love  passages, 
Hamsun  has  many  pages  of  such  crassness  that 
often,  at  the  first  reading  of  his  books,  they 
seem  to  overshadow  and  blot  out  the  fine- 
ness. He  treats  the  subject  of  sex  sometimes 
with  brutal  Old  Testament  directness,  some- 
times with  a  rough,  caustic  humor  akin  to 
that  of  "Tom  Jones"  or  "Tristam  Shandy,"  but 
never  with  sultry  eroticism  or  with  innuendo 
under  the  guise  of  morality.  There  is  in 
his  very  earthiness  something  that  brings  its 
own  cleansing,  as  water  is  cleansed  by  pass- 
ing through  the  ground.  Probably  most  of 

72 


The  Poet 

us  would  willingly  have  spared  from  his 
pages  many  passages  in  "Benoni"  and  "Rosa," 
"The  Last  Joy,"  and  more  especially  in  his 
last  book  "Women  at  the  Pump,"  and  even 
in  "Growth  of  the  Soil,"  but  they  all  belong 
to  the  author's  conception  of  a  true  picture  of 
life. 

"What  was  love?"  writes  Johannes  in  "Vic- 
toria." "A  wind  soughing  in  the  roses,  no,  a 
yellow  phosphorescence.  Love  was  music 
hot  as  hell  which  made  even  the  hearts  of  old 
men  dance.  It  was  like  the  marguerite  which 
opens  wide  at  the  approach  of  night,  and  it 
was  like  the  anemone  which  closes  at  a  breath 
and  dies  at  a  touch. 

"Such  was  love. 

"It  could  ruin  a  man,  raise  him  up,  and 
brand  him  again;  it  could  love  me  to-day, 
you  to-morrow,  and  him  to-morrow  night, 
so  fickle  was  it.  But  it  could  also  hold  fast 
like  an  unbreakable  seal  and  glow  unquench- 
ably  in  the  hour  of  death,  so  everlasting  was 
it.  What  then  was  love? 

"Oh,  love  it  was  like  a  summer  night  with 
stars  in  the  heavens  and  fragrance  on  earth. 

73 


Knut  Hamsun 

But  why  does  it  make  the  youth  go  on  secret 
paths,  and  why  does  it  make  the  old  man  stand 
on  tiptoe  in  his  lonely  chamber?  Alas,  love 
makes  the  human  heart  into  a  garden  of  toad- 
stools, a  luxuriant  and  shameless  garden  in 
which  secret  and  immodest  toadstools  grow. 

"Does  it  not  make  the  monk  sneak  by 
stealth  through  closed  gardens  and  put  his 
eye  to  the  windows  of  sleepers  at  night? 
And  does  it  not  strike  the  nun  with  foolish- 
ness and  darken  the  understanding  of  the 
princess?  It  lays  the  head  of  the  king  low 
on  the  road  so  that  his  hair  sweeps  all  the 
dust  of  the  road,  and  he  whispers  indecent 
words  to  himself  and  sticks  his  tongue  out. 

"Such  was  love. 

"No,  no,  it  was  something  very  different 
again,  and  it  was  like  no  other  thing  in  all 
the  world.  It  came  to  earth  on  a  night  in 
spring  when  a  youth  saw  two  eyes,  two  eyes. 
He  gazed  and  saw.  He  kissed  a  mouth, 
then  it  was  as  if  two  lights  had  met  in  his 
heart,  as  a  sun  that  struck  lightning  from  a 
star.  He  fell  in  an  embrace,  then  he  heard 
and  saw  nothing  more  in  all  the  world. 

74 


The  Poet 

"Love  is  God's  first  word,  the  first  thought 
that  passed  through  his  brain.  When  he 
said:  Let  there  be  light!  then  love  came. 
And  all  that  he  had  made  was  very  good, 
and  he  would  have  none  of  it  unmade  again. 
And  love  became  the  origin  of  the  world 
and  the  ruler  of  the  world.  But  all  its  ways 
are  full  of  blossoms  and  blood,  blossoms  and 
blood." 


GOD  IN  NATURE 

THE  fervent  love  of  nature  which  vi- 
br'ates  through  everything  Hamsun 
has  written  has  endeared  him  to  many 
of  his  countrymen  who  are  repelled  by  his 
eroticism  and  out  of  sympathy  with  his  social 
theories.  The  lyric  rhapsodies  in  "Pan" 
minister  to  a  deep  and  real  craving  in  the 
Norwegian  temperament,  and  it  is  not  for 
nothing  that  this  book  has  steadfastly  held 
its  own  as  the  first  in  the  affections  of  the  pub- 
lic. "Fair  is  the  valley;  never  saw  I  it 
fairer,"  said  Gunnar  of  Hlidarendi  in  "Njal's 
Saga,"  when  he  turned  from  the  ship  he  had 
made  ready  to  carry  him  away  from  his  Ice- 
land home,  and  went  back  to  face  certain 
death  there  rather  than  save  himself  by  ban- 
ishment. To  the  Northerner,  whether  he  be 
Icelander,  Swede,  or  Norwegian,  natural  en- 
vironment is  the  determining  influence  in  the 
choice  of  his  home ;  and  not  only  the  poet  and 


The  Poet 

artist  but  the  average  middle  class  individual, 
clerk,  teacher,  or  store-keeper,  will  forego 
social  life  and  endure  much  discomfort  in 
order  to  establish  himself  in  a  place  where 
he  can  satisfy  the  love  of  beauty  in  nature 
which  is  one  of  the  strongest  passions  in  the 
Northern  races.  And  yet,  however  fair  the 
valley  of  his  home,  he  will  yearn  to  get  away 
from  it  sometimes,  to  rove  alone  on  skis  over 
the  snowfields  or  bury  himself  in  a  forest  hut 
far  from  the  sound  of  a  human  voice.  The 
vast  uncultivated  stretches  of  Norway  have 
enabled  the  people  to  follow  their  bent  and 
seek  outdoor  solitude,  and  while  the  habit 
has  not  fostered  in  them  the  pleasant  urban 
virtues  of  nations  that  live  more  in  cities,  it 
has  developed  a  richness  and  intensity  of  in- 
ner life  which  has  flowered  vividly  in  their 
art  and  literature. 

The  solitary  hunter  of  "Pan"  is  perhaps  the 
most  typically  Norwegian  among  the  Ham- 
sun heroes,  and  in  him  love  of  nature  has 
deepened  into  a  veritable  passion.  This 
book,  which  followed  several  novels  of  city 
and  town  life  and  was  written  during  a  sum- 

77 


Knut  Hamsun 

mer  in  Norway  after  a  sojourn  abroad,  is  the 
first  full-toned  expression  of  Hamsun's  feel- 
ing for  nature.  It  has  a  melting  tenderness 
and  a  warm  intimacy  of  knowledge  which 
can  only  come  from  much  living  out  of  doors, 
as  the  author  did  when  he  herded  cattle  as 
a  boy,  and  later  when  he  roved  through  the 
country  as  a  vagrant  laborer.  To  read  it  is 
like  nothing  else  but  lying  on  your  back  and 
gazing  up  to  the  mountains  until  you  feel  the 
breath  of  the  forest  as  your  own  breath  and 
sense  no  stirring  of  life  except  that  which 
sways  the  trees  above  you.  The  feeling  of 
being  one  with  nature,  of  enfolding  all  things 
with  affection  and  being  oneself  enfolded  in 
a  universal  goodness,  is  typical  of  Hamsun's 
attitude.  He  never  paints  nature  merely  as 
the  scenic  background  for  his  human  drama, 
and  he  never  romances  about  nature  for  its 
own  sake.  He  rarely  describes  in  detail;  it 
is  as  though  he  were  too  near  for  description. 
Like  a  child  which  buries  its  face  on  its 
mother's  breast  and  does  not  know  whether 
her  features  are  homely  or  beautiful,  he  seems 
to  be  hiding  his  face  in  the  grass  and  listening 

78 


The  Poet 

to  the  pulse-beats  of  the  earth  rather  than 
standing  off  and  looking  at  it.  "I  seem  to  be 
lying  face  to  face  with  the  bottom  of  the 
universe,"  says  Glahn,  as  he  gazes  into  a  clear 
sunset  sky,  "and  my  heart  seems  to  beat  ten- 
derly against  this  bottom  and  to  be  at  home 
here."  Nothing  is  great  or  small  to  him. 
A  boulder  in  the  road  fills  him  with  such  a 
sense  of  friendliness  that  he  goes  back  every 
day  and  feels  as  though  he  were  being  wel- 
comed home.  A  blade  of  grass  trembling  in 
the  sun  suffuses  his  soul  with  an  infinite  sea 
of  tenderness. 

"Pan"  is  full  of  lyric  outbursts.  When 
Glahn  revisits  the  forest  on  the  first  spring 
day,  he  is  moved  to  transports.  He  weeps 
with  love  and  joy  and  is  dissolved  in  thank- 
fulness to  all  living  things.  He  calls  the 
birds  and  trees  and  rocks  by  name;  nay,  even 
the  beetles  and  worms  are  his  friends.  The 
mountains  seem  to  call  to  him,  and  he  lifts 
his  head  to  answer  them.  He  can  sit  for 
hours  listening  to  the  tiny  drip,  drip  of  the 
water  that  trickles  down  the  face  of  the  rocks, 
singing  its  own  melody  year  in  and  year  out, 

79 


Knut  Hamsun 

and  this  faint  stirring  of  life  fills  his  soul  with 
contentment. 

Glahn  follows  the  intense  seasonal  changes 
of  Nordland.  At  midsummer,  when  the  sun 
hardly  dips  its  golden  ball  in  the  sea  at  night, 
he  sees  all  nature  intoxicated  with  sex,  rush- 
ing on  to  fruition  in  the  few  short  weeks  of 
summer.  Then  mysterious  fancies  come  over 
him.  He  weaves  a  strange  tale  about  Iselin, 
the  mistress  of  life,  the  spirit  of  love,  who 
lives  in  the  forest.  He  dreams  that  she  comes 
to  him  and  tells  about  her  first  love.  The 
breath  of  the  forest  is  like  her  breath,  and  he 
feels  her  kisses  on  his  lips,  and  the  stars  sing 
in  his  blood.  The  women  who  meet  him  in 
the  forest,  Eva  and  the  little  goat-girl,  seem  to 
him  only  a  part  of  nature  as  they  expand 
unconsciously  to  love  like  the  flower  in  the 
sun,  and  he  takes  what  they  give  him.  Yet 
there  is  in  him  a  spiritual  craving  which  these 
loves  of  the  forest  can  not  satisfy. 

Summer  passes;  the  first  nipping  sense  of 
autumn  is  in  the  air,  and  the  children  of 
nature  too  feel  the  benumbing  hand  of  com- 
ing winter,  as  if  the  brief  thrill  of  summer 

80 


The  Poet 

in  their  veins  had  already  subsided.  But  in 
the  solitude  of  the  dark,  colcT  "iron  nights" 
the  Northern  Pan  wins  from  Nature  the  high- 
est she  has  to  give  him.  As  he  sits  alone,  he 
gives  thanks  for  "the  lonely  night,  for  the 
mountains,  the  darkness,  and  the  throbbing 
ocean.  .  .  .  This  stillness  that  murmurs  in  my 
ear  is  the  blood  of  all  nature  that  is  seething. 
God  who  vibrates  through  the  world  and  me." 
Though  "Pan"  is  Hamsun's  first  great  rap- 
turous hymn  to  nature,  his  earlier  novel 
"Mysteries"  contains  some  beautiful  passages 
that  may  be  considered  a  prelude  to  it.  Nagel 
is  absorbed  in  the  affairs  of  men  and  smitten 
with  the  modern  social  unrest.  He  lives  the 
life  of  books  and  thoughts  and  is  no  half- 
savage  hunter  like  Glahn,  but  he  seeks  in  na- 
ture the  sense  of  vastness  and  infinity  that  his 
soul  longs  for.  He  loves  to  lie  on  his  back 
and  feel  himself  sailing  off  into  the  sea  of 
heaven.  "He  lost  himself  in  a  transport  of 
contentment.  Nothing  disturbed  him,  but  up 
in  the  air  the  soft  sound  went  on,  the  sound  of 
an  immense  stamping-mill,  God  who  trod  his 
wheel.  But  in  the  woods  round  about  him 

81 


Knut  Hamsun 

there  was  not  a  stir,  not  a  leaf  or  a  pine-needle 
moved.  Nagel  curled  up  with  pleasure,  drew 
his  knees  up  under  him,  and  shivered  with  a 
sense  of  how  good  it  all  was.  .  .  .  He  was  in 
a  strange  frame  of  mind,  filled  with  psychic 
pleasure.  Every  nerve  in  him  was  alive,  he 
felt  music  in  his  blood,  felt  himself  akin  to 
nature  and  the  sun  and  the  mountains  and 
everything  else,  felt  himself  caught  up  in  a 
vibration  of  his  own  ego  from  trees  and  hil- 
locks and  blades  of  grass.  His  soul  expanded 
and  was  like  a  full-toned  organ  within  him. 
He  never  forgot  how  the  soft  music  literally 
rose  and  fell  with  the  pulsing  of  his  blood." 
As  in  "Pan"  and  "Mysteries,"  so  in  his 
other  books  Hamsun  makes  us  feel  the  moods 
of  nature  through  those  of  his  people.  In 
"Victoria"  we  are  always  conscious  of  the 
colorful  background  of  heather  and  rowan 
and  sparkling  blue  sea  because  the  minds  of 
Johannes  and  Victoria  are  steeped  in  the 
beauty  of  the  land  where  they  have  played  as 
children.  In  the  big  Nordland  novels,  on  the 
other  hand,  we  meet  people  who  take  no  direct 
interest  in  their  natural  environments,  and 

82 


The  Poet 

here  the  author  is  more  chary  of  his  nature  lyr- 
icism. The  careless,  childish,  volatile  fisher- 
folk  and  day  labourers  in  "Benoni"  and 
"Rosa"  and  in  "Segelfoss  Town"  take  the 
glory  of  the  sea  and  the  cliffs  with  their 
swarms  of  white-winged  birds  very  much  for 
granted  and  have  nothing  to  say  about  them, 
but  unconsciously  their  life  rises  and  falls  with 
the  seasons.  "It  was  spring  again"  is  the  al- 
most invariable  prelude  to  action  in  the  Nord- 
land  novels.  The  warm  nights  had  come ;  the 
red  sunlight  was  over  sea  and  land;  the  boys 
and  girls  went  about  singing  and  laughing  and 
flirting  the  whole  night  long,  and  even  the  old 
felt  the  stirring  of  youth  in  their  blood,  the 
unquenchable  old  villain  Mack  got  "the  strong 
look"  in  his  eyes  again,  and  poor  old  Holmen- 
graa  went  on  devious  paths.  There  is  a  glam- 
our and  a  fairy-tale  atmosphere  always  rest- 
ing over  Nordland  summers,  but  when  au- 
tumn comes,  a  numbed  torpor  steals  over 
everything,  as  if  people,  like  nature,  were 
only  lying  dormant  waiting  for  spring  to 
wake  them  again. 

Even  that  glamour  which  redeems  the  little- 

83 


Knut  Hamsun 

ness  in  "Segelfoss  City"  has  died  in  "Women 
at  the  Pump,"  the  author's  latest  book,  in 
which  he  depicts  the  petty  mean,  degenerate 
people  of  a  small  town  that  seems  afflicted 
with  dry  rot,  and  the  total  absence  of  feeling 
for  nature  has  much  to  do  with  the  grey  and 
rayless  effect  of  this  novel.  In  "Growth  of 
the  Soil,"  on  the  other  hand,  there  is  a  won- 
derful sense  of  the  nearness  of  nature.  Isak 
could  not  put  his  reflections  into  words,  but  a 
simple  awe  takes  possession  of  him  in  the  lone- 
liness of  the  forest  and  the  moors,  where  he 
"meets  God."  As  Geissler  expresses  it,  the 
plain  people  of  Sellanraa  meet  nature  bare- 
handed in  the  midst  of  a  great  friendliness, 
and  the  mountains  stand  around  and  look  at 
them. 

Yet  Hamsun's  feeling  for  nature  is  by  no 
means  a  mere  primitive  emotion;  it  is  rather 
the  reasoned  expression  of  a  man  who  has 
found  his  way  back  to  the  real  sources  of  life. 
In  its  subtlest  and  most  artistic  form  it  ap- 
pears in  the  "Wanderer"  books.  The  over- 
emphasis and  extravagance  which  could,  in 
"Pan,"  verge  on  the  hysterical  are  gone,  and 


The  Poet 

instead  there  is  a  mellow  sweetness,  a  poig- 
nant tenderness  as  of  a  man  who  knows  that 
his  own  autumn  has  arrived  and  that  winter 
is  on  the  way.  It  is  Indian  summer  in  the 
opening  chapter  of  "Under  the  Autumn  Star." 
The  air  is  mild  and  warm  and  tranquil,  every- 
thing breathes  peace  after  the  brief,  intense 
effort  of  summer  to  put  forth  growth.  Round 
about  stand  the  red  rowans  and  the  stiff- 
necked  flowers  refusing  to  know  that  fall  is 
here.  In  these  paragraphs  the  keynote  of  the 
book  is  given,  and  throughout  this  book  and 
its  sequel,  "A  Wanderer  Plays  with  Muted 
Strings,"  the  harmony  with  nature  is  pre- 
served. For  all  the  charm  of  the  story  and 
the  pungency  of  the  reflections  on  various 
themes,  that  which  lingers  in  the  reader's  mind 
is  the  long  autumn  road,  the  nights  in  the 
fragrant  hayloft,  the  smell  of  freshly  felled 
trees,  and  the  fire  in  the  woods  where 
the  Wanderer  is  alone  at  last  with  nature. 
Hamsun  loves  the  warm,  expansive  moods 
of  nature  and  has  confessed  to  a  positive  dis- 
like of  ice  and  snow.  Descriptions  of  winter 
are  rare  in  his  books,  but  the  opening  chapter 

85 


Knut  Hamsun 

of  "The  Last  Joy"  finds  the  Wanderer  snow- 
bound in  a  hut  far  up  in  the  mountains,  and 
although  he  watches  the  spring  awakening  of 
nature,  he  knows  that  in  his  own  life  winter 
has  come  to  stay.  For  that  very  reason  he 
feels  as  never  before  a  great  upwelling  of 
affection  for  all  things  around  him,  animate 
and  inaminate.  He  can  sit  for  hours  merely 
watching  the  course  of  the  sun,  or  speculating 
about  some  tiny  bug  which  was  born  and 
will  probably  die  on  the  one  leaf  it  inhabits, 
or  marvelling  at  the  wonder  of  reproduction 
in  a  little  plant  that  is  releasing  its  seed. 
A  lonely  little  path  straggling  through  the 
forest  affects  him  like  a  child's  hand  in  his 
own.  A  lacerated  pine  stump  rouses  his  pity 
as  he  stands  gazing  at  it  until  his  other,  civil- 
ized self  reminds  him  that  his  eyes  have 
probably  acquired  the  simple  animal  expres- 
sion of  people  in  the  Stone  Age.  He  walks 
over  a  hillside  and  feels  a  tenderness  emanat- 
ing from  it.  "It  is  not  really  a  hillside,  it  is  a 
bosom,  a  lap,  so  soft  is  it,  and  I  walk  care- 
fully and  do  not  tramp  heavily  on  it  with  my 
feet.  I  am  filled  with  wonder  at  it:  a  great 

86 


KNUT  HAMSUN 
From  a  Painting  by  Henrik  Lund 


The  Poet 

hillside  so  tender  and  helpless  that  it  allows 
us  to  use  it  as  a  mother,  allows  an  ant  to  crawl 
over  it.  If  there  is  a  boulder  half  covered 
with  grass,  it  has  not  just  happened  here;  it 
lives  here  and  has  lived  here  long." 

As  he  walks  on,  he  begins  to  feel  a  strange 
influence  about  him.  "Something  vibrates 
softly  in  me,  and  it  seems  to  me  as  so  often 
before  out  of  doors  that  the  place  has  just 
been  left,  that  some  one  has  just  been  here 
and  has  stepped  aside.  At  this  moment  I 
am  alone  with  some  one  here,  and  a  little 
later  I  see  a  back  that  vanishes  in  the  forest. 
It  is  God,  I  say  to  myself.  There  I  stand,  I 
do  not  speak,  I  do  not  sing,  I  only  look. 
I  feel  that  my  face  is  filled  with  the  vision. 
It  was  God,  I  say  to  myself.  A  figment 
of  the  imagination,  you  will  reply.  No, 
a  little  insight  into  things,  I  say.  Do  I 
make  a  god  of  nature?  What  do  you  do? 
Have  not  the  Mohammedans  their  god  and 
the  Jews  their  god  and  the  Hindoos  their  god? 
No  one  knows  God,  my  little  friend,  men 
only  know  gods.  Now  and  then  it  seems  to 
me  that  I  meet  mine." 

87 


Knut  Hamsun 

In  one  of  his  oriental  travel  sketches  Ham- 
sun has  said  that  unlike  most  people  he  never 
gets  through  with  God,  but  feels  the  need  of 
brooding  over  him  under  the  starry  heavens 
and  listening  for  his  voice  in  the  breath  of 
the  forest.  In  "The  Last  Joy"  the  sense  of 
God  in  nature  is  always  present  in  the  back- 
ground of  the  narrator's  thoughts.  In  the 
great  stillness,  where  he  is  the  only  human 
being,  he  feels  himself  expanding  into  some- 
thing greater  than  himself,  he  becomes  God's 
neighbor.  The  last  joy  is  to  retire  and  sit 
alone  in  the  woods  and  feel  the  friendly  dark- 
ness closing  around  him.  "It  is  the  lofty 
and  religious  element  in  solitude  and  dark- 
ness that  makes  us  crave  them.  It  is  not  that 
we  want  to  get  away  from  other  people  be- 
cause we  can  not  bear  to  have  any  one  near 
us — no,  no!  But  it  is  the  mysterious  sense 
that  everything  is  rushing  in  on  us  from  afar, 
and  yet  all  is  near,  so  that  we  sit  in  the  midst 
of  an  omnipresence.  Perhaps  it  is  God." 


WITH   MUTED  STRINGS 

THE  superiority  of  youth  over  age  has 
been  a  cardinal  doctrine  with  Ham- 
sun. How  seriously  he  has  taken  it 
is  best  shown  by  the  fact  that  four  of  his  plays 
and  three  of  his  novels  are  devoted  to  the 
theme.  First  in  point  of  time  is  the  dra- 
matic trilogy,  "At  the  Gate  of  the  King- 
dom" (1895),  "The  Game  of  Life"  (1896), 
and  "Sunset"  (1898),  presenting  three  stages 
in  the  life  of  the  philosopher  Kareno.  Of 
later  date  are  the  three  novels,  "Under  the  Au- 
tumn Star"  (1906),  "A  Wanderer  Plays  with 
Muted  Strings"  (1909),  and  "The  Last  Joy" 
(1912),  each  marking  a  milestone  in  the  prog- 
ress of  the  Wanderer  toward  the  land  of 
old  age.  Quite  alone  stands  "In  the  Power  of 
Life"  (1910),  a  drama  which  shows  an  ag- 
ing courtezan  desperately  trying  to  retain  a 
few  shreds  of  her  power  over  men. 

Kareno,  a  native  of  Nordland,  has  Lapp 


Knut  Hamsun 

blood  in  his  veins,  which  may  in  part  ac- 
count for  the  latent  weakness  that  comes  out 
in  him  as  soon  as  the  strong  impetus  of  youth 
has  died  down.  At  twenty-nine  he  rushes 
into  print  gallantly  to  attack  the  prevailing 
ideals  of  his  day,  such  as  eternal  peace,  the 
apotheosis  of  labor,  the  humanitarian  efforts 
to  preserve  life  however  worthless,  and  in  gen- 
eral the  gods  of  liberalism.  Spencer  and 
Stuart  Mill,  who  were  at  that  time  names  to 
conjure  with,  he  called  mediocrities  devoid 
of  inspiration.  His  most  violent  onslaughts 
were  reserved  for  the  doctrine  that  youth 
should  honor  old  age.  For  these  theories  he 
sacrificed  wife  and  home,  career  and  friends. 
In  the  following  play  we  find  him,  now 
thirty-nine,  as  tutor  to  a  rich  man's  children 
in  Nordland.  His  intellect  is  already  be- 
fuddled. By  means  of  a  glass  house  provided 
with  powerful  lenses,  which  his  patron  is  help- 
ing him  to  build  and  equip,  he  is  trying  to 
achieve  by  material,  technical  contrivances  the 
clarity  which,  after  all,  he  has  proved  himself 
unable  to  evolve  from  within.  His  moral  fibre 
too  is  weakened.  At  twenty-nine  he  allowed 

90 


The  Poet 

his  young  wife  to  leave  him  rather  than  tem- 
porize with  his  conscience;  now  he  becomes 
absorbed  in  a  passion  for  his  patron's  daughter, 
Teresita,  a  wanton,  capricious  woman  of  the 
Edvarda  type  but  without  Edvarda's  sweet- 
ness. Formerly  he  refused  to  save  his  home 
from  impending  catastrophe  by  a  preferred 
loan  from  his  comrade  Jerven,  because  the 
money  was  the  fruit  of  Jerven's  apostacy  from 
their  common  cause;  now  he  is  ready  to  ac- 
cept bounty  from  any  source. 

A  fire  which  consumes  his  house  and  manu- 
scripts terminates  his  work  in  Nordland,  and 
we  hear  no  more  of  him,  before,  in  the  last 
of  the  three  plays,  we  find  him  in  Christiania 
again.  He  is  now  fifty,  and  his  deterioration 
is  complete.  He  is  settling  down  to  a  life 
of  smug  Philistine  contentment,  enjoying  the 
fortune  which  his  wife  has  in  the  meantime 
inherited,  and  accepting  the  daughter  who  is 
the  fruit  of  his  wife's  unfaithfulness  rather 
than  quarrel  with  the  comforts  she  provides 
for  him.  'Kareno  has  somehow  managed  to 
preserve  a  semblance  of  his  former  fire  and 
with  it  a  reputation  for  prowess  as  a  dauntless 


Knut  Hamsun 

fighter,  but  in  his  heart  he  is  already  out  of 
sympathy  with  the  cause  of  youth  and  ready 
to  turn  traitor  at  the  first  beckoning  of  really 
substantial  honors. 

The  other  characters  have  gone  through 
the  same  process  of  dissolution.  Jerven  has 
continued  his  inevitable  downward  course. 
His  one  time  fiancee,  Miss  Hovind,  who 
broke  with  him  because  of  his  apostacy,  has 
become  a  silly  old  maid  who  glories  in  her 
former  connection  with  the  famous  profes- 
sor. Only  Hoibro,  the  man  outside  the 
parties  who  is  still  at  variance  with  everything 
accepted,  has  kept  himself  at  fifty-one  un- 
spotted from  the  world. 

The  weakness  of  the  trilogy  lies  partly  in 
the  character  of  Kareno  which  shows  not  so 
much  the  softening  of  fibre  due  to  old  age  as 
the  revelation  of  a  latent  meanness,  and  partly 
in  the  nature  of  the  principles  for  which  he 
is  expected  to  sacrifice  himself.  It  is  true 
that  he  feels  in  his  youth  the  reality  of  the 
spiritual  above  the  temporal,  and  in  the  face 
of  impending  ruin  he  can  say:  "It  is  as  though 
I  had  been  alone  on  earth  last  night.  There 

92 


The  Poet 

is  a  wall  between  human  beings  and  that 
which  is  outside  them,  but  this  wall  is  now 
worn  thin,  and  I  will  try  to  break  it  down, 
to  knock  my  head  through  it  and  see.  And 
see!"  But  what  he  sees  is  only  temporalities, 
not  eternal  verities.  Granted  that  the  liberal 
movement  had  become  stale  and  needed  a  re- 
newal, there  was  nothing  in  that  fact  to  create 
a  supreme  issue.  It  was  one  of  many  move- 
ments that  have  run  and  will  run  their  nat- 
ural course  till  the  inevitable  reaction  sets  in. 
There  was  no  great  scientific  truth  or  fiery 
religious  passion  involved,  nothing  to  call 
forth  a  Galileo  or  a  Luther.  As  with  Kar- 
eno,  so  with  Jerven  and  Miss  Hovind.  A  girl 
who  breaks  with  her  lover  because  he  weak- 
ens in  his  denunciations  of  Spencer  and  Stuart 
Mill  is  a  strain  on  the  reader's  credulity. 

There  is  only  one  of  the  vaunted  principles 
in  the  trilogy  which  has  a  universal  appli- 
cation, namely  the  doctrine  that  a  man  at  fifty 
is  useless  and  should  resign  his  place  to  the 
young,  but  this  doctrine  Kareno  can  hardly 
be  expected  to  hold  with  the  same  uncom- 
promising rigor  at  fifty  as  at  twenty-nine. 

93 


Knut  Hamsun 

The  whole  situation  therefore  becomes  far- 
cical, and  we  can  hardly  wonder  that  the  mid- 
dle-aged philosopher  wipes  his  brow  when  his 
young  quondam  admirer  reads  in  his  ear  the 
following  quotation  from  his  own  early 
works : 

"What  do  you  demand  of  the  young?  That 
they  shall  honor  the  old.  Why?  The  doc- 
trine was  invented  by  decrepit  age  itself. 
When  age  could  no  longer  assert  itself  in  the 
struggle  for  life,  it  did  not  go  away  and  hide 
its  diminished  head,  but  made  itself  broad  in 
exalted  places  and  commanded  the  young  to 
do  honor  and  pay  homage  to  it.  And  when 
the  young  obeyed,  the  old  sat  up  like  big  sex- 
less birds  gloating  over  the  docility  of  youth. 
Listen,  you  who  are  young!  Set  a  match 
under  the  old  and  clear  the  seat  and  take 
your  place,  for  yours  is  the  power  and  the 
glory  for  ever  and  ever.  .  .  .  When  the  old 
speak,  the  young  are  expected  to  be  silent. 
Why?  Because  the  old  have  said  it.  So  age 
continues  to  lead  its  protected,  carefree  exis- 
tence at  the  expense  of  youth.  The  old  hearts 
are  dead  to  everything  except  hatred  for  the 

94 


The  Poet 

new  and  the  young.  And  in  the  worn-out 
brains  there  is  still  strength  left  for  one  more 
idea,  a  sly  idea :  that  youth  shall  honor  tooth- 
lessness.  And  while  the  young  are  hampered 
and  thwarted  in  their  development  by  this 
cynical  doctrine,  the  victors  themselves  sit 
and  gloat  over  their  marvellous  invention  and 
think  life  is  very  fine  indeed." 

Written  while  Hamsun  was  yet  under  forty, 
the  three  Kareno  plays  are  an  aftermath  of  his 
own  struggles  as  a  young  man  to  break  into 
the  ring  of  the  accepted.  They  are  an  outcry 
against  the  older  men  who  had  once  been 
iconoclasts,  but  had  standardized  their  icono- 
clasm,  who  had  once  been  advocates  of  free 
thought,  but  had  forged  free  thought  into  a 
weapon  to  strike  down  all  who  differed  from 
themselves.  It  is  therefore  no  accident  that 
Kareno's  onslaughts  are  directed  against  a 
stereotyped  liberalism.  The  trilogy  is  sig- 
nificant as  a  subjective  expression  of  a  cer- 
tain phase  in  the  author's  development,  but  in 
psychological  interest  it  is  far  inferior  to  the 
Wanderer  books.  In  these  Hamsun  has  rid 
himself  of  all  bitterness  and  has  found  a  sweet 

95 


Knut  Hamsun 

and  mellow  tone  that  is  singularly  appealing. 
He  is  no  longer  a  theorist  but  a  poet,  that  is 
he  is  himself  at  his  best  and  highest.  He  no 
longer  vaunts  a  principle  but  portrays  a  hu- 
man being. 

The  Wanderer  is  a  man  who  renounces  the 
cafes  and  boulevards  and,  after  eighteen  years 
of  city  life,  revisits  the  haunts  of  his  youth 
disguised  as  a  vagrant  laborer.  Thus  he 
divests  himself  of  whatever  pomp  and  circum- 
stance surround  a  successful  middle-aged 
man  and  well  known  citizen,  in  order  to  meet 
youth  on  equal  terms  simply  as  Knud  Peder- 
sen,  a  man  whose  muscles  are  a  little  stiff  and 
whose  beard  is  getting  grey.  "Under  the  Au- 
tumn Star"  and  "A  Wanderer  Plays  with 
Muted  Strings,"  bound  together  in  the  Eng- 
lish edition  under  the  common  title  "Wan- 
derers," relate  experiences  lying  five  or  six 
years  apart.  In  the  first  the  narrator  is  near- 
ing  fifty;  in  the  second  he  has  passed  the  mark. 
The  Wanderer  in  "Under  the  Autumn  Star" 
is  still  full  of  vim  and  vigor,  loves  to  feel  his 
contact  with  the  soil  again,  and  glories  in  his 
prowess,  notably  in  the  invention  of  a  won- 


The  Poet 

derful  saw  which  absorbs  him.  He  becomes 
enamored  of  Fru  Falkenberg,  wife  of  the 
captain  on  whose  estate  he  has  taken  service, 
and  is  young  enough  to  make  frantic  attempts 
to  win  her,  even  throwing  off  his  disguise  and 
appearing  in  his  own  character;  but  when  she 
begs  him  not  to  pursue  her,  he  desists. 

Some  years  later  his  longing  drives  him 
again  to  the  Falkenberg  estate,  but  now  he  is 
in  a  different  frame  of  mind.  He  "plays  with 
muted  strings."  He  still  works  with  his  old 
energy,  but  his  invention,  the  marvellous  saw, 
has  become  "literature"  to  him.  Women  are 
"literature."  He  makes  no  attempt  to  ap- 
proach Fru  Falkenberg,  but  from  his  ob- 
scure place  among  her  other  servants  he 
watches  mournfully  her  gradual  deterioration 
and  philosophizes  over  the  causes  that  led  to 
it.  The  captain  and  his  wife  have  drifted 
apart  from  sheer  idleness,  because  they  have 
no  separate  pursuits  that  might  take  them 
away  from  each  other  and  give  their  hours  to- 
gether the  freshness  of  reunions.  In  the  ear- 
lier book,  the  wife,  though  she  is  drifting 
hither  and  thither  on  the  breath  of  longing 

97 


Knut  Hamsun 

and  discontent,  is  so  essentially  true  that  she 
feels  even  the  homage  of  her  humble  admirer 
as  a  danger  which  she  must  flee  from.  When 
the  Wanderer  comes  back,  the  idle  years  have 
done  their  work  on  her.  "She  had  nothing 
to  do,  but  she  had  three  maids  in  her  house; 
she  had  no  children,  but  she  had  a  piano.  But 
she  had  no  children,"  muses  the  Wanderer. 
But  while  he  himself  keeps  the  distance  she 
has  imposed  upon  him,  he  sees  a  younger, 
more  brazen  admirer  pushing  himself  into 
her  favor.  The  scruples  that  bind  the  man 
past  fifty  have  no  existence  for  the  youth  of 
twenty-two.  The  Wanderer  feels  no  passion 
of  jealousy,  but  only  a  great  weary  lassitude 
and  loneliness.  He  knows  that  for  him  it  is 
evening.  He  grieves  over  her  ruin,  but  can 
do  nothing  to  avert  it.  All  he  can  do  is  to  put 
his  whole  heart  into  the  humble  task  of  pre- 
paring her  home  against  her  possible  return, 
helping  the  captain  to  paint  and  refurnish 
the  house.  His  efforts  are  of  no  avail;  Fru 
Falkenberg  returns  to  her  husband,  but  too 
many  fine  threads  have  been  broken,  and  their 
life  together  proves  impossible. 


The  Poet 

After  her  death  the  Wanderer  seeks  the 
solitude  of  a  forest  hut,  and  there  he  sits  look- 
ing over  his  life  in  retrospect  after  the  fashion 
of  those  who  know  that  life  is  chiefly  behind 
them.  "I  remember  a  lady,  she  guarded  noth- 
ing, least  of  all  herself.  She  came  to  such  a 
bad  end.  But  six  or  seven  years  ago  I  had 
never  believed  that  any  one  could  be  so  fine 
and  lovely  to  another  person  as  she  was.  I 
drove  her  carriage  on  a  journey,  and  she  was 
bashful  before  me,  although  she  was  my  mis- 
tress; she  blushed  and  looked  down.  And  the 
strange  thing  was  that  she  made  me  too  bash- 
ful before  her,  although  I  was  her  servant. 
Only  by  looking  at  me  with  her  two  eyes  when 
she  gave  me  an  order  she  revealed  to  me  beau- 
ties and  values  beyond  all  those  I  had  known 
before.  I  remember  it  even  now.  Yes.  I 
am  sitting  here  and  thinking  of  it  yet,  and  I 
shake  my  head  and  say  to  myself :  How  strange 
it  was,  no,  no,  no!  And  then  she  died.  What 
more?  Then  there  is  no  more.  I  am  left. 
But  that  she  died  ought  not  to  grieve  me;  I 
had  been  paid  in  advance  for  that  when,  with- 
out my  deserving  it,  she  looked  at  me  with  her 

99 


Knut  Hamsun 

two  eyes."  A  middle-aged  sigh  breathes 
through  these  words,  the  sigh  of  a  man  who 
has  known  life  and  felt  it  to  be  good  and  who 
is  not  avid  for  more.  He  is  a  letter  that  has 
arrived  and  is  no  longer  on  the  way;  that 
which  matters  is  whether  its  contents  have 
brought  joy  or  sorrow  or  whether  they  have 
fallen  to  the  ground  without  making  any  im- 
pression. He  has  come  too  late  to  the  berry- 
fields,  and  there  is  no  more  to  be  said.  His 
only  hope  is  that  he  may  never  become  senile 
enough  to  imagine  himself  wise  because  he 
is  old. 

The  two  volumes  contained  in  "Wander- 
ers" are  among  the  most  finished  of  Ham- 
sun's production.  I  have  already  spoken  of 
the  harmony  between  nature  and  the  moods  of 
men.  In  the  human  drama,  too,  the  artistic 
unity  is  always  preserved.  It  is  held  through- 
out in  low  tones,  and  while  the  Wanderer  en- 
ters so  well  into  his  role  that  we  sometimes 
forget  he  is  not  really  a  common  laborer, 
we  are  never  allowed  to  forget  his  age.  We 
are  always  conscious  of  the  gentle  enervation 
stealing  over  his  faculties  and  the  gradual 

100 


The  Poet 

loosening  of  his  hold  on  life.  He  becomes 
all  the  time  less  and  less  of  a  participant  in 
the  story,  more  and  more  of  an  onlooker. 

In  'The  Last  Joy"  old  age  is  no  longer 
standing  at  the  door ;  it  has  come  in  and  laid  its 
hand  upon  him.  "I  am  driven  by  fire  and 
fettered  by  ice,"  writes  the  Wanderer  in  the 
hut  where  he  has  retired  to  make  the  big  irons 
within  him  glow.  In  truth  he  is  not  sure 
whether  he  still  has  any  irons  or  whether  he 
can  still  heat  them.  The  ideas  that  once 
rushed  in  upon  him  with  overwhelming  force 
now  come  only  at  the  cost  of  painstaking  la- 
bor. Bodily  work  too  has  become  irksome 
to  him,  and  when  he  begins  to  long  for  inter- 
course with  other  people,  he  does  not,  like 
the  Wanderer  in  the  earlier  books,  hire  him- 
self out  to  service,  but  goes  to  spend  some  idle 
months  at  a  tourist  hotel.  There  he  learns 
that  his  heart  is  not  too  old  to  give  him 
trouble,  when  he  falls  in  love  with  Ingeborg 
Torsen.  He  is  attracted  by  her  brilliant 
beauty  and  glowing  vitality,  and  he  looks  at 
her  waywardness  with  a  deep  and  tender  com- 
prehension which  no  young  man  could  have 

101 


Knut  Hamsun 

given  her.  No  doubt  he  might  have  won  her, 
but  he  is  restrained  by  the  horror  of  being 
grotesque  and  indulging  in  antics  unbefitting 
his  age.  So  he  stands  by,  and  again  he  is 
fated  to  see  the  woman  he  loves  ruining  her- 
self. But  Ingeborg  Torsen  is  of  tougher 
fibre  than  Fru  Falkenberg,  and  she  saves  her- 
self in  a  marriage  which  brings  her  children 
and  heavy  household  cares.  The  Wanderer 
has  played  the  role  of  her  fatherly  friend  and 
confidant,  but  at  last  he  realizes  that  she  does 
not  need  him  any  more  even  in  this  capacity. 
The  knowledge  hurts,  but  not  for  very  long, 
and  not  very  severely.  His  feeling  for  her 
has  been  real,  the  loss  of  her  leaves  him  a  little 
more  sad  and  lonely  than  before,  but  love 
with  him  is  no  longer  the  inexorable,  devas- 
tating passion  that  sent  Glahn  and  Nagel  to 
their  death. 

Hamsun  has  essayed  in  "Wanderers"  and 
"The  Last  Joy"  to  show  the  enervating  influ- 
ence of  the  years.  Again  and  again  he  tells  us 
that  age  can  add  nothing  but  only  take  away, 
that  age  is  not  ripeness,  it  is  just  age — just 
toothlessness.  Yet  the  impression  left  on  the 

102 


The  Poet 

reader's  mind  is  that  of  a  personality 
gradually  being  detached,  first  from  the 
fetters  of  its  own  passions,  then  from  absorp- 
tion in  other  people,  and  finding  at  last  free- 
dom in  loneliness. 


103 


THE  LITERARY  ARTIST 

THE  time  immediately  preceding  Ham- 
'sun's  authorship  was,  in  Norway,  a 
period  of  revolt.  All  the  established 
canons  of  public  and  private  morality  were 
being  questioned,  and  literature  was  made  a 
platform  of  debate  in  a  manner  never  be- 
fore known.  No  poet  who  respected  himself 
was  content  to  be  merely  a  songster.  He  felt 
it  incumbent  upon  him  to  be  a  thinker  and  a 
prophet,  a  moralist  and  a  reformer.  Hence 
every  new  novel  or  drama  that  appeared  pro- 
pounded some  opinion  on  free  love  or  mar- 
riage, the  doctrines  of  the  established  church, 
the  upheavel  of  the  social  order,  the  position 
of  women,  the  reform  of  the  school  system,  or 
other  topic  of  timely  discussion.  To  realize 
the  change  that  had  come  over  literature  we 
need  only  compare  Ibsen  in  "Brand"  with  Ib- 
sen in  "Ghosts."  In  the  former  he  probed  the 
human  heart,  laid  bare  the  weaknesses  that  are 

104 


The  Poet 

common  to  humanity  under  all  conditions,  and 
gave  poetic  form  to  the  ideals  that  are  the 
same  in  all  ages.  In  the  latter  he  took  up 
a  special  pathological  problem  on  which  his 
knowledge  could  be  called  in  question  by  any 
medical  expert.  In  the  same  vein,  Kielland, 
the  creator  of  the  inimitable  Skipper  Worse, 
devoted  his  talents  to  demonstrating  in  a  novel 
the  evils  of  silence  regarding  venereal  dis- 
eases. Bjornson  was  perhaps  the  worst  of- 
fender of  all,  and  yet  his  preaching  was 
salved  by  such  a  broad  and  warm  humanity 
that  his  pedantry  could  be  forgiven.  Among 
his  novels  of  the  period,  "The  Kurt  Family," 
which  begins  with  tremendous  power,  drib- 
bles out  into  a  treatise  on  hygiene  and  mo- 
rality, but  happily  the  artist  in  Bjornson  is  too 
big  to  be  confined  within  the  limits  he  has  set 
himself,  and  occasionally  he  bursts  out  into 
delightful  scenes.  In  the  end,  however,  we 
leave  Thomas  Rendalen  and  Nora  clasping 
hands  over  a  mission  instead  of  making  love 
in  the  old-fashioned  way.  In  "A  Gauntlet" 
Bjornson  lets  Svava  formulate  the  single 
standard  of  morality;  in  "A  Bankruptcy"  he 

105 


Knut  Hamsun 

takes  up  the  subject  of  business  integrity,  and 
so  on.  Among  the  great  creative  writers,  Jonas 
Lie  and  Garborg  escaped  comparatively  un- 
scathed, Jonas  Lie  because  he  never  could 
abandon  his  habit  of  portraying  life  instead 
of  reasoning  about  it,  and  Garborg  because  he 
saved  himself  in  time  by  going  back  to  the 
soil  and  the  peasantry,  where  he  discovered  a 
fountain  of  poetic  renewal.  The  lesser 
authors  followed  the  lead  of  Bjornson  and  Ib- 
sen in  their  less  happy  vein  and  without  their 
genius.  The  whole  tendency,  which,  to  be- 
gin with,  had  had  the  freshness  of  revolt,  of 
indignation,  and  of  hope,  was  becoming  smug 
and  standardized. 

A  scapegoat  had  to  be  found  for  the  ills 
from  which  the  authors'  heroes  and  heroines 
were  suffering,  and  Ibsen  named  it  in  "A 
Doll's  House,"  when  he  let  Nora  lay  the  blame 
for  her  foolishness  on  "society" — reasoning  so 
out  of  keeping  with  the  character  of  the  child- 
ish, irresponsible  Nora  that  we  can  not 
help  wondering  how  Ibsen  ever  made  it  sound 
plausible.  It  was  accepted  because  it  fell  in 
with  the  prevailing  mood  of  the  day.  If 

1 06 


The  Poet 

only  society  could  be  reorganized  after  a  pat- 
tern on  the  reformers'  nail  all  would  be  well! 
They  forgot  what  seems  to  us  at  this  day  ob- 
vious to  the  point  of  banality,  namely  that 
when  Nora  had  taken  a  full  course  in  com- 
mercial arithmetic,  and  Svava  had  vowed  to 
die  unwed,  and  all  the  little  Millas  and  Toras 
and  Thinkas  in  good  Fru  Rendalen's  school 
had  learned  all  about  the  pitfalls  that  awaited 
them,  there  would  still  be  the  devastating 
power  of  love ;  and  when  everybody  had  a  job 
so  that  young  men  could  marry  at  the  natural 
time  and  young  women  need  not  marry  ex- 
cept for  love,  there  would  still  be  those  sud- 
den, erratic  attractions  and  repulsions  which 
work  havoc  and  create  tragedies  under  the 
most  well-ordered  conditions.  Moreover, 
they  forgot  that,  although  the  wrongs  which 
cry  out  for  reform  may  be  susceptible  to  ar- 
tistic treatment,  the  reforms  themselves,  cir- 
cumscribing as  they  do  ideals  by  finite  achieve- 
ment, are  not  food  meet  for  the  imaginative 
writer.  A  reformed  Marshalsea  would  not 
have  given  us  any  Little  Dorrit.  In  Nor- 
wegian literature,  Jonas  Lie  painted  a  gallery 

107 


Knut  Hamsun 

of  splendid  women  whose  grandeur  of  out- 
line is  thrown  into  relief  by  the  pettiness  of 
their  surroundings;  his  Inger-Johanne  and 
Cecilie  are  tragic  figures  when  they  beat  their 
wings  against  the  bars  of  convention,  but 
when  a  later  generation  of  writers  attempted 
to  send  Inger-Johanne  to  normal  school  and 
let  Cecilie  learn  typewriting,  the  romance  was 
dead. 

Against  this  whole  school  of  literature  with 
its  absorption  in  types  and  causes  Hamsun 
protested  with  all  his  youthful  vehemence  and 
all  his  power  of  drastic  ridicule.  It  would 
not  be  correct  to  say  that  he  advocated  a  re- 
turn to  the  principle  of  art  for  art's  sake.  In- 
deed he  has  used  his  own  literary  work  as 
the  vehicle  of  any  opinion  that  pressed  for 
utterance  in  him,  from  his  reflections  on  the 
state  of  Norwegian  literature  in  "Mysteries" 
to  those  on  the  evils  of  the  tourist  traffic  in 
"The  Last  Joy."  The  truth  is  rather  that  his 
poetic  sensibilities  recoiled  from  the  smug  sa- 
pience, the  heavy  sententiousness  that  would 
rob  life  of  its  spontaneity  and  reduce  it  to  a 
pharmaceutical  formula :  so  much  democracy, 

1 08 


The  Poet 

so  much  popular  education,  so  much  reform 
legislation,  and  a  perfect  state  of  society 
would  follow  inevitably.  He  disliked  the 
thinness  and  bloodlessness  of  a  literary  art  that 
substituted  reasoning  for  inspiration.  Poets, 
he  said,  should  not  be  philosophers;  they  usu- 
ally philosophized  very  badly,  as  witnessed 
Ibsen  and  Tolstoy  when  they  departed  from 
their  function  as  poets  and  began  to  prescribe 
remedies  for  the  ills  of  the  world.  As  for 
Bjornson,  he  revered  him  not  because  of  his 
activities  as  a  preacher  and  a  moralist,  but  in 
spite  of  them,  because  of  his  humanness,  his  ir- 
repressibility,  his  endless  power  of  growth  and 
renewal.  One  of  Hamsun's  most  beautiful 
poems  is  a  homage  to  Bjornson. 

In  his  later  years,  Hamsun  has  himself  es- 
sayed the  role  of  the  preacher,  or,  as  a  Nor- 
wegian critic  put  it,  he  has  assumed  Bjorn- 
son's  habit  of  occasionally  chastising  the  Nor- 
wegian nation  for  its  own  good  in  a  fatherly 
fashion.  There  is  a  difference,  however,  be- 
tween him  and  his  predecessors.  They  were 
sometimes  institutional;  he  is  always  personal. 
They  sometimes  attempt  to  construct  the 

109 


Knut  Hamsun 

world  from  a  diagram  of  planes  and  angles; 
he  always  follows  the  flowing  lines  of  the  art- 
ist. Even  when  he  preaches,  his  message  is  in 
its  essence  a  part  of  his  poetic  impulse.  His 
apotheosis  of  the  man  with  the  hoe  springs 
from  his  longing  to  get  close  to  the  soil  and 
draw  strength  from  primal  sources.  His  impa- 
tience with  all  the  modern  army  of  semi-intel- 
lectual workers,  the  clerks  and  administrators 
who  wind  red  tape  and  spoil  white  paper,  is  in 
keeping  with  his  craving  to  brush  aside  all 
that  cumbersome  machinery  which  men  inter- 
pose between  the  human  will  and  the  physical 
realities.  His  strident  condemnation  of  the 
movements  that  are  counted  liberal  in  our  day 
is  a  protest  against  the  levelling  which  robs 
life  of  its  color  and  sharp  contrasts.  His 
imagination  demands  the  peaks  and  high 
lights  and  can  find  no  satisfaction  in  the  mod- 
ern cult  of  mediocrity  or  the  dull  grey  level 
of  utilitarianism. 

To  Hamsun  the  abstraction  called  society, 
which  looms  so  large  in  the  liberal  thought  of 
to-day,  has  no  existence.  He  sees  only  indi- 
viduals, and  this  is  one  of  the  reasons  why, 

no 


The  Poet 

even  when  he  waxes  didactic,  he  does  not  cease 
to  be  artistic.  Isak,  who  is  his  ideal  type  of 
citizen,  is  also  one  of  his  great  poetic  crea- 
tions. In  his  earlier  and  more  personal  work, 
however,  the  element  of  moralizing  is  ab- 
sent. The  typical  Hamsun  hero,  a  Glahn  or 
a  Nagel,  is  not  to  be  measured  with  the  yard- 
stick of  ordinary  standards.  What  inter- 
ests their  creator  is  not  the  patent  virtues  and 
vices  which  can  easily  be  catalogued,  but  the 
fugitive  life-spark  that  defies  analysis  and  yet 
is  what  constitutes  personality.  To  the  poet 
the  intangible  and  elusive  is  the  real,  the  ev- 
anescent is  the  stable.  Why  do  people  do 
thus  and  so?  "Ask  the  wind  and  the  stars. 
Ask  the  dust  on  the  road  and  the  leaves  that 
fall,  ask  the  mysterious  God  of  life,  for  no 
one  else  knows." 

The  message  of  Hamsun's  later  works, 
which  has  swept  them  like  a  life-giving  stream 
over  a  world  made  arid  by  pseudo-civiliza- 
tion, is:  Back  to  nature!  Back  to  the  land! 
The  message  of  his  earlier  works  was:  Back 
to  poetry!  Away  from  problems  and  causes 
back  to  the  dream  and  the  vision!  There  is 

in 


Knut  Hamsun 

no  contradiction  between  the  two;  both  are 
equally  genuine  expressions  of  a  personality 
which  has  the  richness,  the  many-sidedness 
and  spontaneity  of  life  itself. 

His  method  of  artistic  presentment  is  as 
fresh  and  unhackneyed  as  his  subject  matter. 
It  has  always  been  regarded  as  the  function 
of  the  artist  to  separate  the  great  from  the 
small,  the  essential  from  the  unessential,  and 
to  make  a  character,  a  human  life,  or  an  event 
stand  out  in  sculptured  clearness  freed  from 
the  accidental  and  the  extraneous.  With  this 
ideal  in  view,  writers  have  concentrated  their 
efforts  on  the  great  revealing  scenes  in  the 
career  of  their  heroes.  Hamsun  breaks  en- 
tirely with  this  tradition.  To  him  nothing  is 
small  or  extraneous.  His  books  are  like 
broad  surfaces  rippled  by  many  points  of 
light,  and  it  is  only  gradually  that  these  points 
of  light,  the  tiny  but  pregnant  incidents  and 
the  flashing  bits  of  description,  separate  and 
converge  to  form  images.  It  is  a  part  of  his 
method  in  creating  an  illusion  of  life  to  draw 
his  characters  into  the  circle  of  our  acquain- 
tanceship, not  by  great  dramatic  scenes  lead- 

112 


The  Poet 

ing  up  to  a  climax,  or  by  sudden  opening  of 
abysses  as  in  Ibsen,  still  less  by  long  descrip- 
tion, but  by  just  such  scattered  and  casual 
bits  of  information  as  usually  build  up  our 
knowledge  of  people  and  events  in  real  life. 
Some  trifle  is  blown  in  on  our  consciousness 
and  finds  a  lodgement  there ;  it  may  be  a  quo- 
tation or  a  word  of  comment  that  stirs  our 
expectancy  and  prepares  us  to  meet  an  indi- 
vidual. We  see  his  shadow  falling  over 
the  path  of  another  person  or  feel  his  pres- 
ence like  a  breath  of  wind.  Perhaps  we 
hear  no  more  of  him  at  the  time,  but 
in  another  book  we  meet  him  again,  and 
now  he  is  the  hero,  whom  we  follow  until  we 
think  we  know  him  like  a  dog-eared  school- 
book — until  some  sudden  turn  upsets  our  the- 
ories, and  we  leave  him  in  the  last  chapter 
with  a  baffled  sense  of  imperfect  understand- 
ing. But  the  author  is  not  yet  done  with 
him.  In  some  later  book,  which  is  not  a  se- 
quel in  the  ordinary  sense  but  brushes  the 
fringes  of  the  first,  we  come  upon  a  passage 
that  throws  a  backward  light  over  the  ground 
we  have  traversed.  When  we  close  "Pan," 

"3 


Knut  Hamsun 

for  instance,  we  know  no  more  of  Edvarda 
than  her  lover  knows,  but  when  we  read 
"Rosa"  we  find  the  clue  to  her  nature.  In 
the  same  manner,  Dagny,  the  heroine  of  "Mys- 
teries," does  not  reveal  her  heart  before  we 
meet  her  again  as  one  of  the  subordinate  char- 
acters in"  "Editor  Lynge."  It  is  as  though  a 
figure  that  had  once  sprung  from  the  author's 
brain  became  imbued  with  such  vitality 
that  it  continued  to  live  through  his 
later  works.  J.  P.  Jacobsen  once  said  that 
he  was  forced  to  let  all  his  people  die, 
because  death  was  the  only  real  end ;  nothing 
in  life  ever  ended.  Hamsun  sometimes  re- 
sorts to  this  method,  but  even  then  the  dead 
live  on  in  the  memory  of  those  who  have 
known  them.  With  him  nothing  is  ever 
finished  or  finite. 

Hamsun's  humor  is  all-pervasive;  it  is  the 
yeast  that  lightens  his  loaf.  When  Al- 
bert Engstrom,  the  Swedish  humorist,  ended, 
an  appreciation  of  Hamsun  by  saying,  "And 
finally  I  love  you  for  the  gleam  in  your  left 
eye,"  he  found  an  apt  expression  for  the  per- 
sonality that  shines  through  Hamsun's  works. 

114 


The  Poet 

His  humor  has  less  of  wit  than  of  comicality, 
less  of  the  laugh  than  the  smile  with  a  gleam 
in  his  eye;  and  he  is  as  ready  to  smile  at  his 
own  intensities  as  at  the  weaknesses  of  human- 
ity. His  flights  of  fancy  are  tempered  with 
irony,  his  real  reverence  with  a  playfulness 
that  often  takes  the  guise  of  impish  irrev- 
erence. He  loves  the  far-flung  paradox  and 
the  sudden  transition  of  thought  by  which  he 
astonishes  his  readers. 

The  quality  of  unexpectedness  in  his 
thought  is  well  simulated  in  the  style  he  has 
evolved  for  himself.  This  style  was  fully  de- 
veloped when  Hamsun  made  his  first  appear- 
ance as  an  author,  a  fact  which  adds  interest  to 
Sigurd  Hoel's  opinion  that  the  dash  and  bril- 
liance of  "Hunger"  was  due  to  American  in- 
fluence. Certainly  Hamsun  has  never  im- 
proved upon  this  style,  and  it  may  even  be 
questioned  whether  its  manner  with  the  light 
staccato  touch,  the  prevalence  of  interjec- 
tions and  sentences  consisting  sometimes  of  a 
single  word,  has  not  in  some  of  his  later  works 
hardened  into  a  mannerism  that  results  in  a 
slight  weariness  of  repetition.  Taken  as  a 


Knut  Hamsun 

whole,  however,  his  style  has  been  a  bath  of 
rejuvenation  to  Northern  literature.  It  has 
the  naturalness  of  the  spoken  word,  following 
blithely  the  quips  and  pranks  of  thought  that 
give  zest  to  conversation  but  are  usually  flat- 
tened out  before  they  reach  print.  The  re- 
sult is  a  light  whimsicality,  a  capriciousness 
which  Hamsun  cultivates  with  subtle  and  con- 
scious art,  until  he  attains  a  sparkle  and  vivid- 
ness, an  ease  and  flexibility  never  before 
known  in  the  language  of  his  country. 

As  the  literary  artist  Hamsun  gives  us  ap- 
ples of  gold  in  pitchers  of  silver,  and  the 
metal  for  both  is  entirely  of  his  own  forging. 


116 


THE  CITIZEN 


THE  CITIZEN 

HOLDING   UP   THE   MIRROR  TO    HIS 
GENERATION 

VERY  early  in  his  career  as  an  author 
Hamsun  struck  the  keynote  of  the 
message   which   in  his  most   recent 
works  he  has  preached  with  so  much  power. 
The  two  novels  "Editor  Lynge"  (1893)  and 
"Shallow  Soil"  (1893),  satirizing  certain  jour- 
nalistic and  literary  phenomena  in  Christi- 
ania,  showed  the  reverse  side  of  the  ideal  in 
which  he  believes,  and  by  contrast  pointed  the 
way  to  new  standards  and  new  goals. 

The  main  character  in  "Editor  Lynge"  is  an 
intellectual  parvenue,  a  peasant  lad  who  has 
risen  to  the  position  of  editor-in-chief,  not  by 
great  and  commanding  qualities,  but  by  a 
cheap  smartness,  a  facility  for  shoving  himself 
in,  and  a  brazen  self-possession  that  never  de- 
serts him.  He  is  without  real  convictions  and 
real  courage,  and  yet  manages  to  hoodwink 

119 


the  public  into  thinking  him  a  great  moral 
leader.  A  scandal-monger  under  pretence  of 
defending  virtue,  he  impudently  assumes  the 
right  to  pry  into  other  people's  affairs  and 
spread  them  large  over  the  pages  of  his  paper. 
Some  of  the  obnoxious  sides  of  Lynge's  ac- 
tivity we  can,  of  course,  recognize  as  belong- 
ing to  the  dark  side  of  daily  newspaper  work 
everywhere,  although  they  appear  with  more 
transparent  naivete  in  a  small  country.  In 
making  him  a  peasant  lad  who  had  risen  into 
another  class  without  assimilating  its  stand- 
ards, who  attempted  to  be  a  leader  without 
having  inherited  the  traditions  of  lead- 
ership, Hamsun  had  in  mind  certain 
phases  of  a  transition  period  in  his 
own  country.  Popular  education  had  opened 
the  professions  and  government  offices  to  coun- 
try lads,  but  could  not  in  a  single  generation 
give  them  real  culture.  They  remained  men- 
tally homeless  and  rootless.  In  Lynge  he 
portrays  a  man  who  has  suffered  an  injury  to 
his  soul  by  a  transplantation  which  could 
never  be  complete.  Significantly  enough, 
Lynge's  most  ardent  admirer  is  another  trans- 

120 


The  Citizen 

planted  country  boy,  Endre  Bondesen,  whose 
origin  is  stamped  on  him  in  his  name  (Bon- 
desen, peasant's  son) .  He  too  has  lost  his  con- 
tact with  the  soil  and  thereby  lost  the  stand- 
ards of  conduct  in  his  own  class  without  ac- 
quiring those  in  the  class  he  has  entered. 
Their  attitude  toward  the  new  possibilities 
that  open  before  them  Hamsun  describes  as 
a  kind  of  triumphant  snicker:  "Tee-hee- 
hee!  what  great  fellows  we  are!" 

The  author  of  "Hunger,"  who  a  few  years 
earlier  had  described  the  purgatory  prepared 
for  the  young  genius  who  is  struggling  to  get 
into  print  and  to  live  on  the  proceeds  of  his 
work,  did  not  have  to  go  far  afield  for  the  caus- 
tic sting  with  which  he  scourged  the  people 
who  make  themselves  broad  in  the  inner  courts 
of  journalism  and  literature.  In  "Editor 
Lynge"  he  parodied  the  vaunted  power  of  the 
press.  In  "Shallow  Soil"  he  painted  a  pic- 
ture of  the  small  geniuses  who  pose  on  street 
corners  and  in  cafes  and  bask  in  the  popular 
admiration  that  is  liberally  bestowed  on  even 
the  thinnest  rinsings  from  the  wine-glass  of 
genius.  The  little  poets  and  artists  regard 

121 


Knut  Hamsun 

themselves  as  divinely  exempted  from  all  the 
sordid  but  necessary  work  of  the  world,  and 
believe  their  own  slight  productions  are  suf- 
ficient excuse  for  a  parasitical  life  in  vice  and 
idleness.  There  is  Oien  who  is  so  ex- 
hausted after  squeezing  out  of  his  brain  a  few 
small  prose  poems  that  he  has  to  be  sent  to 
a  sanitarium  at  the  expense  of  his  friends,  and 
there  is  Irgens,  the  only  one  who  seems  ac- 
tually to  bring  forth  a  real  book  occasionally, 
using  his  privilege  as  a  poet  to  live  on  the 
bounty  of  friends  whom  he  is  playing  false 
in  the  most  dastardly  way.  With  them  is  a 
crowd  of  idlers  and  revellers  whose  chief  am- 
bition is  to  find  some  one  who  will  pay  for 
their  next  meal. 

As  a  contrast  to  this  despicable  coterie 
Hamsun  has  not  raised  up  a  real  genius  like 
his  own  alter  ego  in  "Hunger,"  but  two  young 
business  men  whom  he  uses  to  point  the  moral 
of  regular  work  and  contact  with  actualities 
as  the  great  salvation  of  modern  civilization. 
The  keynote  is  struck  in  the  opening  chapter 
with  a  finely-etched  picture  of  the  awaken- 
ing city,  when  Irgens  with  waxed  mustache 

122 


The  Citizen 

and  patent  leather  shoes  is  strolling  home 
from  a  night  of  debauch  and  finds  Ole  Hen- 
riksen,  alert  and  clear-eyed,  already  at  his 
desk  in  his  father's  big  office  on  the  dock,  and 
fortunately  able  to  spare  the  ten  krone  bill 
which  the  poet  needs. 

Ole  Henriksen  and  his  friend  Andreas 
Tidemand,  in  their  moral  cleanliness,  their 
modesty  and  chivalry,  their  loyalty  to  each 
other  and  generosity  to  their  friends,  are  not 
unlike  the  ideal  young  business  hero  of  Amer- 
ican novels,  but  they  are  afflicted  with  the  cult 
of  genius  which  was  prevalent  in  their  country 
at  the  time.  They  like  to  be  seen  dining  at 
the  Grand  with  poets  and  painters  and  actors, 
and  gladly  assume  the  privilege  of  paying  the 
bills  for  the  crowd,  while,  with  a  simplicity 
that  borders  on  gullibility,  they  allow  the  one 
his  wife  and  the  other  his  fiancee  to  be  de- 
coyed away  from  them  by  the  enterprising 
poet  Irgens.  Hanka  Tidemand,  a  really 
sweet  and  chaste  nature,  has  accustomed  her- 
self to  the  role  of  sympathizing  with  genius, 
and  when  she  gives  herself  to  Irgens  it  is  al- 
most with  a  sense  of  being  a  pious  burnt-of- 

123 


Knut  Hamsun 

fering  on  the  altar  of  his  poetry.  Aagot,  a 
fresh,  pretty  country  girl,  one  of  Hamsun's 
brightest  and  youngest  heroines,  is  dazzled 
by  the  glamour  of  the  literary  circle  into 
which  she  is  introduced,  and  becomes  the 
poet's  next  victim.  Hanka  awakens  to  a  re- 
alization that  it  is  her  husband  whom  she 
loves  and  returns  to  him.  Aagot,  with  less 
stamina,  is  completely  demoralized,  and  Ole 
Henriksen  shoots  himself  rather  than  survive 
the  old  Aagot,  the  innocent  Aagot,  whom  he 
had  loved. 

"Shallow  Soil"  is  perhaps  to  a  greater  ex- 
tent than  any  of  Hamsun's  other  works  based 
on  certain  local  conditions  and  phases  of  devel- 
opment in  his  own  country.  The  cult  of 
pseudo-genius  which  it  ridicules  is  not  so 
prevalent  among  us  that  its  satire  can  come 
home  to  us  as  it  did  to  the  author's  country- 
men. The  book  will  always  appeal,  however, 
by  virtue  of  its  literary  qualities.  The  critic 
Carl  Morburger  calls  it  Hamsun's  most  fin- 
ished literary  masterpiece.  The  subtle  delin- 
eation of  character,  the  vividness  in  the  por- 
trayal of  contrasting  personalities,  and  the 

124 


The  Citizen 

fresh,  natural  tone  save  it  from  the  senten- 
tiousness  into  which  a  novel  with  so  evident  a 
purpose  would  have  fallen  in  the  hands  of  a 
lesser  artist. 

The  two  friends  Ole  Henriksen  and  An- 
dreas Tidemand,  who  are  chosen  to  illustrate 
the  mental  and  moral  tone  acquired  from  prac- 
tical work,  are  both  merchants.  It  is  the  oc- 
cupation which,  next  to  husbandry,  makes  the 
greatest  appeal  to  the  author's  imagination. 
He  does  not,  however,  tell  us  much  of  the 
achievements  of  his  heroes.  His  idea  of  the 
merchant's  business  as  the  life-giving  artery 
of  a  district  is  not  developed  until  many 
years  later  in  the  wonderfully  ramified  pic- 
tures of  whole  communities,  usually  with  a 
Nordland  background,  in  which  the  trading 
magnate  nearly  always  occupies  the  centre  of 
the  stage. 

In  "Pan"  we  first  encounter  the  great  Mack 
family  which  pervades  the  Nordland  novels. 
Edvarda's  father,  the  master  of  Sirilund,  is 
something  of  a  fop  with  his  diamond  shirt 
studs  and  his  pointed  shoes  among  the  boul- 
ders, and  rather  more  of  a  villain,  a  man  to 

125 


Knut  Hamsun 

whom  the  neighborhood  pays  its  tribute  of 
wives  and  maidens  as  a  Zulu  tribe  to  its  chief- 
tain, but  for  all  that  a  small  superman  by 
whose  brains  the  community  exists.  In 
"Dreamers"  (1904)  we  see  at  close  range  his 
still  greater  brother  Mack  of  Rosengaard,  who 
hovers  like  a  fairy-tale  in  the  background  of 
the  other  books.  But  Mack  of  Sirilund  is 
one  of  the  characters  that  Hamsun  has  not 
been  able  to  leave,  and,  fourteen  years 
after  the  publication  of  "Pan,"  we  meet  him 
again  in  "Benoni"  (1908)  and  "Rosa"  (1908). 
He  is  a  providence  and  a  small  god  to  the  sim- 
ple people  of  the  neighborhood.  Whatever 
else  falls,  Mack  stands  impregnable  as  a  rock. 
His  existence  among  them  is  an  earnest  that 
somehow  the  world  will  go  on,  even  if  the  fish- 
ing fails,  and  boats  are  lost  at  sea.  Whoever 
has  no  money  goes  to  Mack  for  credit,  and 
who  has  money  entrusts  it  to  him;  for  banks 
are  distant  and  mysterious  institutions,  Mack 
is  real  and  near.  His  business  is  in  fact  built 
on  the  small  sums  thus  put  at  his  disposal,  but 
he  never  deviates  from  his  attitude  of  con- 
ferring a  favor  upon  the  lender.  His  self- 

126 


The  Citizen 

possession,  his  elegance  of  dress,  his  polish  of 
manner  are  unfailing.  There  are  ugly  pages 
in  Mack's  history,  ruined  homes,  and  neg- 
lected children  who  have  the  blood  of  the 
Macks  in  their  veins,  but  it  is  part  of  the  man's 
mastery  that,  although  every  member  of  his 
household  knows  of  his  orgies,  he  can  yet 
command  respect — and  Ellen  the  chamber- 
maid loves  him.  The  description  of  Mack's 
erotic  adventures,  in  spite  of  the  humor 
Hamsun  lavishes  on  the  subject,  occupies  an 
uncomfortably  large  amount  of  space  in  these 
books,  but  they  serve  the  author's  purpose  of 
throwing  into  relief  the  power  of  the  man 
who,  in  spite  of  everything,  remained  a  ruler 
by  divine  right.  When  his  scandals  became 
too  rampant,  his  daughter  Edvarda,  then  in 
one  of  her  religious  moods,  attempted  to  re- 
move the  cause  of  offense  and  stirred  up  a 
revolt  among  her  father's  trusted  people. 
Mack  went  to  bed  and  simulated  illness,  but 
the  confusion  resulting  from  the  absence  of 
his  directing  hand  was  such  that  everybody 
was  glad  to  restore  the  old  order  and  have 
Mack  at  his  desk  again. 

127 


Knut  Hamsun 

Hamsun  likes  to  portray  the  patrician  type 
to  which   Mack  belonged   by  inherited   in- 
stincts, but  he  also  enjoys  seeking  out  those 
tough-fibred  people  who  are  not  descendants 
but  become  ancestors.     Among  them  Mack's 
partner  'Benoni    occupies    the    first    place. 
Hamsun's  playfulness  has  never  been  more 
delightful  than  when  he  traces  the  evolution 
of  Post-Benoni,  who  carries  the  King's  mail, 
to    Benoni    Hartvigsen    and    B.   Hartvigsen, 
then  to  B.  Hartwich,  the  partner  of  Mack 
and  the  husband  of  the  great  man's  niece, 
Rosa.     A  big  hairy  creature,  full  of  physical 
vim,  strutting  and  vainglorious,  wearing  two 
coats  to  church  in  summer  to  show  that  he  can 
afford  it,  boasting  of  his  house  and  his  fur- 
nishings patterned  on  Mack's,  Benoni  is  with 
all  his  absurdities  sound  at  the  core.     He  has 
a  childlike  goodness  and  freshness  that  seems 
drawn  from  some  unspoiled  well  of  humanity. 
Benoni   has   his    reverses.     Occasionally   his 
divinity  and  patron  Mack  finds  it  necessary 
to  thrust  him  back  into  the  nothingness  from 
which  he  has  drawn  him,  and  people  begin 
to  call  him  plain  Benoni  again.     Then  his 

128 


The  Citizen 

strutting  waxes  feeble  for  a  while,  but  he 
soon  rebounds  and  rises  higher  than  before. 
It  is  almost  unfair  that  his  fallen  fortunes 
are  repaired  by  the  ridiculous  transaction  of 
selling  a  mineral  mountain  to  a  mad  Eng- 
lishman for  a  fabulous  sum;  we  feel  that  Ben- 
oni  is  quite  capable  of  retrieving  his  losses 
by  his  own  efforts;  but  this  is  a  part  of  the 
melodramatic  strain  which  belongs  to  Nord- 
land,  the  country  of  sudden  fortunes.  When, 
in  the  last  chapter  of  "Rosa,"  the  young  wife, 
in  the  dignity  of  her  first  motherhood,  gently 
takes  the  reins  of  the  household,  we  feel  that 
Benoni  in  the  future  will  prance  with  spirit, 
but  with  discretion  too.  Benoni  and  Rosa 
with  the  "prince"  in  the  cradle  are  firmly 
rooted  in  their  environs  and  have  the  power 
of  growth.  In  such  people  Hamsun  sees  the 
future.  They  are  the  human  stuff  that  en- 
dures. 

In  contrast  to  Benoni  we  have  Rosa's  first 
husband  Nikolai  Arentsen.  He  too  is  of 
humble  birth,  but  while  Benoni  stays  in  the 
place  where  he  has  vital  contacts,  Nikolai 
pushes  himself  into  a  class  where  he  will 

129 


Knut  Hamsun 

never  be  assimilated.  Benoni  applies  his 
naturally  good  brain  to  wrestling  with  the 
problems  near  at  hand,  those  of  the  fish  and 
the  sea.  He  is  engaged  in  the  productive 
work  of  helping  to  haul  in  the  harvest  of  the 
deep.  Nikolai  learns  a  great  many  things  by 
rote.  He  studies  law  and  comes  home  to 
practise  in  his  native  place.  At  first  he  does 
a  thriving  business  on  the  easily  stimulated 
mutual  distrust  of  primitive  people,  but  when 
they  learn  that  it  costs  more  to  go  to  law  than 
to  make  up  their  quarrels,  their  distrust  is 
turned  on  the  lawyer.  His  income  soon 
dwindles  to  nothing,  and  the  small  world  in 
which  he  has  really  no  necessary  function  goes 
on  without  him.  He  has  entered  one  of  the 
professions  that  Hamsun  calls  sterile. 

Hamsun  frequently  contrasts  two  brothers 
one  of  whom  has  stayed  close  to  the  soil  while 
the  other  has  tried  to  work  his  way  into  a 
supposedly  higher  sphere.  In  "Segelfoss 
City,"  there  is  L.  Lasssen  who  is  unmade  from 
a  good  fisherman  and  not  completed  to  a 
bishop,  while  his  brother  Julius  who  has 
stayed  in  his  natural  environment  and  become 

130 


The  Citizen 

a  shrewd  hotel-keeper  has  at  least  some  con- 
tact with  the  realities.  In  "Growth  of  the 
Soil"  Sivert  on  the  farm  is  contrasted  with  El- 
eseus  in  the  office,  and  always  to  the  advan- 
tage of  the  former.  In  "Women  at  the 
Pump"  there  is  a  similar  pair  of  brothers. 
Abel,  the  younger,  a  sweet-tempered,  sturdy 
urchin  with  a  natural  pride  in  killing  snakes, 
has  had  to  shift  for  himself  and  make  his  own 
decisions  almost  from  the  day  he  left  the  cra- 
dle, and  has  developed  into  a  fine  young  man. 
When  the  time  is  ripe,  he  slips  naturally  into 
the  place  in  the  community  where  he  belongs, 
as  the  helper  of  an  old  blacksmith  who  needs 
a  pair  of  young  arms  and  a  bright  young  face 
in  the  smithy.  Within  a  short  time  Abel  is 
the  mainstay  of  the  family.  Frank,  the  elder, 
has  been  put  through  school  and  has  learned 
a  number  of  languages  which,  whether  liv- 
ing or  dead,  will  always  remain  dead  to  him. 
He  is  one  of  the  children  who  are  being 
"prepared  for  farming,  fishing,  cattle-rais- 
ing, trade,  industry,  family  life,  dreams  and 
religious  worship"  by  learning  "the  number 
of  square  miles  in  Switzerland  and  the  dates 


Knut  Hamsun 

of  the  Punic  wars"  and  similarly  vital  facts. 
He  "knew  nothing  of  red  outbursts,  he  never 
rose  to  the  skies  or  fell  down  again,  never 
went  to  the  bottom  or  floated  up.  He  never 
exposed  himself  to  anything  and  had  noth- 
ing to  avoid.  Instead  of  getting  out  of  a 
scrape,  he  never  got  into  one.  Cleverly  done, 
meagrely  done.  God  had  prepared  him  for  a 
philologist." 

It  seems  curious  that  Hamsun  the  poet 
should  never  have  reminded  Hamsun  the 
sociologist  that  dreams  have  an  intrinsic 
value,  that  the  aspirations  which  carried 
Frank  and  Eleseus  and  the  future  Bishop  Las- 
sen  out  from  their  homes  were  in  themselves 
a  moral  asset  inasmuch  as  they  stimulated  not 
only  those  who  went  out  but  also  those  who 
stayed  behind  and  had  their  horizons  opened 
by  contact  with  the  outside  world.  It  is  al- 
most as  though  he  denounced  the  circulation 
of  blood  between  the  country  and  the  city 
as  bad  in  itself.  The  reason  is,  of  course,  that 
he  has  in  mind  certain  standards  and  valu- 
ations which  he  combats  as  wrong  and  false. 
He  ridicules  the  self-delusion  of  those  who 

132 


The  Citizen 

imagine  they  are  educated  because  they  have 
learned  a  number  of  things  which  they  can 
repeat   from   books,    and  who   suppose   that 
"culture"  consists  in  certain  inherited  or  ac- 
quired customs  that  have  nothing  to  do  either 
with  beauty  or  distinction,  but  are  simply  an 
absence  of  the  marked,  the  characteristic,  the 
splendid,   or  the  primitive, — all   that  which 
is   neither   high   nor   low,   but   everlastingly 
on    the    same    dull    grey    level    of    respect- 
ability.    He  derides  those  "whose  hands  are 
so  sick  that  they  can  do  nothing  but  form 
letters"  and  who  think  there  is  something  su- 
perior   about    that    "slave's    work"    writing. 
"It  is  finer  to  write  and  read  than  to  do  some- 
thing with  your  hands,  says  the  upper  class. 
The  lower  class  listens.     My  son  shall  not  till 
the  earth  from  which  everything  that  crawls 
subsists;  let  him  live  on  other  people's  work, 
says  the  upper  class.     And  the  lower  class 
listens.     Then  one  day  the  roar  awoke,  the 
roar  of  the  masses.     The  masses  have  them- 
selves learned  the  arts  of  the  upper  class;  they 
can  read  and  write.     Bring  here  all  the  good 
things  of  the  earth,  they  are  ours!" 

133 


Knut  Hamsun 

In  "The  Last  Joy"  Hamsun  discusses  mod- 
ern education  as  it  affects  women.  Ingeborg 
Torsen  has  been  put  through  the  mill  of  nor- 
mal school  together  with  a  class  of  girls,  some 
richer,  some  poorer  than  herself,  but  all  in- 
tent on  graduation  and  a  position  where  they 
can  put  other  girls  through  the  same  mill. 
She  was  educated  away  from  the  simple, 
healthy  life  of  her  mother  and  became  a 
teacher  without  interest  in  her  work,  while 
her  thwarted  longing  for  marriage  and 
motherhood  became  perverted  into  morbid 
desire.  In  his  estimate  of  the  so-called  ad- 
vancement of  woman  Hamsun  reaches  some 
of  the  same  conclusions  as  Ellen  Key,  but  in 
his  preoccupation  with  the  physical  side  of 
sex  he  fails  to  see  what  Ellen  Key  always  in- 
sists on,  that  motherhood  consists  not  only 
in  bearing  but  in  rearing,  and  that  teach- 
ing is  a  profession  which  more  than  any 
other  gives  women  who  are  not  mothers  an 
outlet  for  the  moral  qualities  of  motherhood. 
He  fails  to  remember  also  that  women  as  well 
as  men  may  burn  with  the  pure  fire  of  a  thirst 
for  knowledge.  Nevertheless,  as  a  satire  of  a 

134 


HAMSUN  AND  His  FAMILY 


Photo  by  Wilse 


The  Citizen 

certain  phase  in  the  woman  movement,  when 
any  other  work  was  considered  superior  to 
that  of  the  home,  Hamsun's  attack  contains  a 
kernel  of  bitter  truth. 

As  the  only  real  aristocracy  Hamsun  sees 
the  big  landed  proprietors  who  ruled  over 
their  little  world  as  kings.  He  does  not  ideal- 
ize the  origin  of  the  great  families,  but 
thinks  that  from  pride  and  will  power  an  aris- 
trocracy  may  develop,  provided  there  is 
money.  "But  it  must  be  wealth,  not  pennies. 
Pennies  are  only  to  coddle  the  race  and  pro- 
tect it  from  wet  feet."  In  "Children  of  the 
Age"  (1913),  and  its  big  two-volume  sequel 
"Segelfoss  City"  (1915)  we  follow  the  de- 
cline of  a  big  family  who  once  owned  all 
the  land  that  Segelfoss  city  was  standing  on. 
The  first  Willatz  Holmsen  was  a  lackey  who 
acquired  money  somehow  and  built  a  palace. 
The  second  Willatz  Holmsen  acquired  cul- 
ture. He  added  white  columns  to  the  pal- 
ace and  filled  it  with  books  and  works  of 
art.  With  him  the  rapid  economic  rise  of 
the  family  reached  its  height.  The  third  ac- 
quired personal  distinction  and  a  sense  of 

'35 


Knut  Hamsun 

noblesse  oblige  which  his  failing  fortune  could 
not  support.  The  lieutenant,  as  he  is  called, 
whose  life  we  follow  in  "Children  of  the 
Age,"  is  a  proud,  lonely  figure,  unable  to 
confide  to  any  one  that  a  Willatz  Holmsen 
might  not  be  able  to  do  all  that  was  expected 
of  him,  and  mortgaging  his  house  rather  than 
disappoint  any  one  who  looked  to  him  for 
funds.  The  fourth  is  a  musician.  He  is  an 
aristocrat  in  his  personal  habits  and  in  his 
sense  of  obligation,  but  he  has  lost  his  father's 
gift  of  command  because  he  has  no  longer  the 
old  faith  in  the  divine  right  of  his  family  to 
rule.  He  can  knock  down  an  impudent  work- 
man, but  he  can  not  quell  by  his  mere  pres- 
ence as  his  father  could.  Democracy  has 
seeped  into  his  tissues.  He  still  flings  gifts 
about  in  a  lavish  way  as  the  Holmsens  have 
always  done,  but  he  avoids  occasions  where 
he  would  hold  the  centre  of  the  stage,  and  is 
at  the  same  time  a  little  hurt  that  he  is  not 
a  wonder  and  a  fairy-tale  to  the  people  as  his 
father  and  mother  were.  He  has  the  modern 
self-doubting  habit  of  mind,  and  is  glad  to  re- 
sign the  position  of  leadership  to  the  new 

136 


The  Citizen 

man,  the  captain  of  industry,  Holmengraa. 
Willatz  Holmsen  the  fourth  is,  both  in  his  fine, 
generous  personal  character  and  in  his  real 
genius  as  a  musician,  an  illustration  of  Ham- 
sun's theory  that  wealth  in  several  generations 
will  produce  culture  of  heart  and  mind,  but 
the  young  man's  development  carries  him  in- 
evitably away  from  Segelfoss,  and  the  brilliant 
career  which  is  foreshadowed  for  him  falls 
outside  the  frame  of  the  story.  As  village 
potentates  the  Holmsens  have  had  their  day. 
Their  dynasty  is  ended. 

"King  Tobias,"  as  Holmengraa  is  called, 
appears  in  a  golden  cloud  of  romance.  He  is 
a  peasant's  son  who  has  acquired  a  fortune  in 
South  America  and  comes  back  to  his  native 
place,  turning  the  sleepy  little  village  into  a 
small  city  overnight.  His  ships  bring  grain 
from  the  Baltic ;  his  mills  grind  day  and  night; 
he  cuts  timber;  he  establishes  a  telegraph 
station,  and  has  work  and  money  for  every- 
body. But  Holmengraa  comes  in  contact 
with  a  new  power  which  he  is  not  strong 
enough  to  resist,  that  of  the  rising  proletar- 
iat. His  men  read  the  "Segelfoss  Times" 

137 


Knut  Hamsun 

which  tells  them  that  all  the  world  rests  on 
their  toil,  that  they  are  wage  slaves,  and  their 
employer  is  an  extortioner.  They  make 
larger  and  larger  demands;  they  become  in- 
solent and  scoff  at  King  Tobias  who  has  now 
sunk  to  be  plain  Tobias  to  them.  Unfortun- 
ately Holmengraa,  who  is  a  modest,  fine- 
fibred  man  and  very  sympathetically  drawn, 
has  his  weakness.  Like  the  great  Mack,  he 
is  unable  to  leave  the  girls  alone,  but  he  has 
not  Mack's  brazen  assurance,  and  his  posi- 
tion is  gradually  undermined.  It  is  found 
that  his  fortune  is  not  so  great  as  first  sup- 
posed, and  his  day  is  short. 

So  village  dynasties  rise  and  fall.  At  last 
comes  one  that  is  not  too  fine-grained  or  sen- 
sitive. Theodor  Jensen  with  the  sobriquet 
"paa  Bua"  (in  the  store)  is  a  selfmade  man 
like  Benoni,  apparently  slighter  and  frothier, 
more  of  a  parody,  but  in  reality  possessed  of 
a  harder  and  more  slippery  cleverness  than 
that  of  the  expansive  Benoni.  Theodor  rises 
out  of  the  most  malodorous  surroundings, 
but,  like  Benoni,  is  himself  sound,  on  the 
whole.  The  village  laughs  at  his  airs,  his 

138 


The  Citizen 

rings,  his  scarf  pin  made  of  a  gold  coin,  his 
absurd  pretensions;  but  little  Theodor  has 
what  the  former  dynasties  lacked,  a  faculty 
for  meeting  every  situation  as  it  arises.  He 
has  pluck  and  shrewdness  and  is  not  entirely 
lacking  in  generosity.  He  builds  a  big  store, 
and  all  the  affairs  of  the  village  revolve  about 
him.  He  extends  credit,  and  servant  girls 
are  divided  into  two  classes,  those  who  have 
credit  at  Theodor's  and  those  who  have  not. 
He  brings  the  world  to  Segelfoss:  silk 
dresses,  canned  goods,  store  shoes,  fireworks, 
a  theatrical  troupe — everything  that  can  be 
named.  In  a  year  of  depression,  when  every- 
body was  in  a  funereal  frame  of  mind,  Theo- 
dor bethought  himself  of  tomb-stones,  and 
presently  the  graveyard  blossomed  out  with  a 
sudden  forest  of  slabs  and  crosses  with  "Rest 
in  Peace"  and  Loved  and  Missed"  on  graves 
that  had  been  neglected  for  a  quarter  of  a 
century.  Theodor  knows  what  the  people 
want.  The  future  is  his. 

Hamsun  has  a  kindness  for  this  merry 
privateer  and  enjoys  blowing  the  wind  that 
swells  little  Theodor's  sails,  but  underneath 

139 


Knut  Hamsun 

the  froth  and  sparkle  there  is  a  bitter  didactic 
purpose  in  this  book.  It  shows  the  reverse 
side  of  modern  progress,  when  a  backward 
community  learns  to  use  the  material  conven- 
iences of  the  age  without  any  corresponding 
mental  advancement.  The  workingmen  have 
learned  to  make  demands,  but  while  they  re- 
fuse to  yield  the  old  submission  to  authority, 
they  have  not  learned  any  sense  of  responsibil- 
ity to  their  own  conscience,  and  therefore 
grow  more  and  more  lazy  and  inefficient 
The  women  forget  to  cook  and  sew  while  they 
buy  flimsy  readymade  clothes  at  (the  store 
and  feed  their  families  on  food  that  is  bought 
ready  cooked  and  chewed  and  almost  digested. 
Neither  men  nor  women  know  what  to  do 
with  their  leisure,  and  general  demoraliza- 
tion is  the  result. 

"Segelfoss  City^"  with  its  dying  aristoc- 
racy, its  captain  of  industry,  and  its  spoiled 
working  class,  is  a  miniature  mirror  of  the 
modern  world  as  Hamsun  sees  it.  In  the 
same  category  belongs  his  last  book,  "Women 
at  the  Pump"  (1920),  but  there  the  deteri- 
oration is  more  complete.  The  events  re- 

140 


The  Citizen 

corded  are  only  a  grey  dribble  from  a  leaky 
town  pump.  "People  in  big  cities  have  no 
idea  of  standards  and  dimensions  in  the  small 
towns,"  so  runs  the  opening  paragraph. 
"They  think  they  can  come  and  stand  in  the 
market-place  and  smile  and  be  superior. 
They  think  they  can  laugh  at  the  houses  and 
the  pavements,  indeed  they  often  think  so. 
But  do  not  old  people  remember  the  time 
when  the  houses  were  still  smaller  and  the 
pavements  still  worse?  And  there  at  least 
C.  A.  Johnson  has  built  himself  a  tremend- 
ously big  house,  a  perfect  mansion.  It  has 
a  veranda  below  and  a  balcony  above  and 
scroll  work  all  the  way  around  the  roof.  .  .  . 
The  small  town  too  has  its  great  men,  its  solid 
families  with  their  fine  sons  and  daughters, 
its  immutableness  and  authority.  And  the 
small  world  is  absorbed  in  its  great  men  and 
follows  their  career  with  interest.  The  good 
small  town  folk  are  really  acting  to  their 
own  advantage  in  doing  this;  they  live  in  the 
shelter  of  authority,  and  it  is  good  for  them." 
What  indeed  would  the  little  town  have 
been  without  Consul  Johnson?  What  glory 

141 


Knut  Hamsun 

would  there  have  been  in  life  without  his  silk 
hat  and  his  rotund  face  beaming  on  the 
crowds  as  they  make  way  respectfully? 
When  the  story  opens,  the  village  is  assembled 
to  watch  the  departure  of  his  steamer,  the 
Fia,  for  foreign  waters.  While  they  wait,  the 
women  at  the  village  pump,  standing  with 
buckets  filled  and  hands  under  their  aprons, 
are  discussing  a  great  event  that  happened  six 
or  seven  years  ago,  but  is  still  undimmed  in 
memories  not  over-burdened  with  weighty  af- 
fairs. It  was  the  day  when  "Johnson  on  the 
Dock"  was  made  consul,  and  everybody  who 
came  into  his  store  was  treated  with  sweet 
cakes  and  a  drink.  Since  then  other  consuls 
had  sprung  up  like  mushrooms;  there  was 
"Barley-Olsen"  and  Henriksen  at  the  Works, 
but  Consul  Johnson's  glory  outshone  that  of 
all  others,  and  his  scandals  only  gave  an  added 
nimbus  to  his  name.  The  measure  of  dif- 
ference between  Hamsun's  earlier  books 
and  "Women  at  the  Pump"  may  be  seen  in 
the  distance  between  the  really  magnificent 
reprobate  Mack  and  the  flabby  Consul  John- 
son, a  man  who  has  become  a  village  mag- 

142 


The  Citizen 

nate  by  the  accident  of  owning  the  only  store 
in  the  neighborhood.  But  village  dynasties 
rise  and  fall,  and  the  Johnson  dynasty  seems 
tottering,  when  it  is  saved  by  the  consul's 
young,  aggressive,  thoroughly  modern  son, 
Schelderup,  who  suddenly  comes  home  and 
raises  the  house  of  Johnson  to  its  old  glory. 
The  consul's  day  is  over,  however,  and  it  is 
pathetic  to  see  him  shrink  back  into  the  ob- 
scurity from  which  accident  had  drawn  him. 
In  his  fall  he  appeals  to  us  as  never  before, 
and  Hamsun  makes  us  feel  that  the  foolish 
old  man  is,  in  his  innermost  nature,  better 
than  the  hard-headed  son. 

Schelderup  brought  order  into  his  father's 
affairs,  but  into  some  he  brought  disorder. 
He  stopped  various  pensions  that  were  being 
paid  for  reasons  known  to  Consul  Johnson 
and  sometimes  to  the  women  at  the  pump. 
Among  other  drastic  steps,  he  abolished  the 
sinecure  at  the  Johnson  warehouse  held  by 
the  cripple  Oliver,  and  the  annual  subsidy 
paid  to  Oliver's  son,  the  philologist  Frank. 
It  is  Oliver  who  is  the  "hero"  of  the  book; 
in  him  "the  little  town  sees  itself  realized." 

H3 


Knut  Hamsun 

Oliver  was  once  a  sailor  with  powerful  arms, 
a  dashing  young  blade  with  a  pretty  sweet- 
heart and  his  life  before  him.  He  goes  away 
on  Consul  Johnson's  Fia  and  comes  back  a 
wreck.  He  has  lost  a  leg  and  has  sustained 
another  injury  not  yet  the  property  of  the 
village  gossips:  he  is  unable  to  become  a 
father.  Oliver  comes  home  to  take  up  his 
life  on  shore,  to  fish  a  little,  to  lie  and  cheat 
his  way  through  life,  to  starve  sometimes, 
to  "find"  sometimes  the  property  of  others, 
to  marry  his  old  sweetheart  Petra  as  a  screen 
for  another  man,  none  less  in  fact  than  the 
great  Consul  Johnson  himself,  and  to  buy 
back  his  mortgaged  home  as  the  price  of  her 
favors  to  another  great  man  of  the  village, 
the  member  of  parliament  and  future  cabinet 
minister  Fredriksen.  He  lives  on  the  mem- 
ories of  the  days  when  he  went  to  sea  and 
on  two  events  that  have  happened  to  him 
since  his  return.  He  has  once  won  a  table- 
cloth in  a  lottery,  and  he  has  once  found  a 
derelict  ship  and  sailed  it  in,  a  deed  which 
resulted  in  putting  his  name  in  the  paper. 
There  is  only  one  bright  spot  in  the  life  of 
144 


The  Citizen 

this  human  wreck,  who  grows  physically  more 
repulsive  as  the  years  go  on.  Only  one  thing 
unites  him  in  a  sweet  and  natural  relation 
with  our  common  humanity,  and  that  is  his 
love  for  the  children  who  are  not  his.  Ham- 
sun here  takes  up  an  interesting  psychological 
question  and  arrives  at  the  opposite  conclu- 
sion from  that  of  Strindberg  in  "The  Father." 
He  shows  that  fatherly  affection  is  not  a 
primitive  instinct  but  a  growth  of  habit 
Oliver  cares  for  his  wife's  children  while  they 
are  small,  and  when  they  grow  up  they  love 
him  and  have  no  interest  in  attaching  them- 
selves to  their  actual  fathers.  Indeed  Oliver's 
importance  in  the  community  grows  in  the 
reflected  light  from  his  successful  children, 
although  the  truth  about  their  origin  has  long 
since  leaked  out  at  the  town  pump.  There  is, 
of  course,  irony  in  this,  but  there  is  also  a 
certain  optimism.  In  his  great  novels  pictur- 
ing the  life  of  whole  communities,  Hamsun 
has  thrown  the  glamour  of  his  art  over  a  big 
gallery  of  insignificant  people.  Mere  pup- 
pets for  his  amusement  they  seem  at  first,  and 
yet,  as  we  penetrate  more  deeply  into  his 


Knut  Hamsun 

work,  we  feel  behind  the  smile  a  great  sweet- 
ness, a  broad  humanity,  and  at  bottom  a  faith 
that  life  fashions  its  own  ends  out  of  all  this 
human  dross  and  fashions  not  badly. 

Hamsun's  social  theories  will  be  sufficiently 
evident  from  the  above  recapitulation  of  the 
novels  in  which  he  is  holding  up  the  mirror 
to  his  generation.  He  rebels  against  all  that 
would  cripple  individual  effort  and  against  all 
modern  standardizing  whether  it  applies  to 
the  choice  of  a  profession  or  to  the  cut  of  a 
garment.  The  levelling  process  which,  in- 
asmuch as  it  can  not  make  all  great,  must 
achieve  equality  by  making  all  small,  he  be- 
lieves to  be  a  disadvantage  for  the  small,  who 
thus  lose  an  ideal  and  an  element  of  romance 
in  their  lives.  He  abjures  all  modern  shams 
and  artificiality  and  particularly  the  false 
standard  that  exalts  the  white  collar  job 
above  the  work  involving  a  little  honest  grime. 
He  would  like  to  see  his  people  a  nation  of 
farmers  and  fishermen  with  an  aristocracy  of 
big  landed  proprietors  and  brainy  business 
men,  but  with  all  the  middle  class  of  admin- 
istrators and  clerical  workers  eliminated. 

146 


The  Citizen 

With  the  latter  he  would  sweep  away  most 
professional  men  and  those  who  hang  on  the 
fringes  of  art  and  literature.  The  real  gen- 
ius, the  poet  by  the  grace  of  God,  he  regards 
as  above  and  outside  of  all  classes. 

These  theories,  to  which  Hamsun  lends  the 
point  of  his  whimsical,  paradoxical  extrav- 
agance, must  be  seen  against  a  background  of 
special  conditions  in  a  small  country  with  a 
large  number  of  brain  workers  proportion- 
ally, and  with,  perhaps,  a  tendency  to  over- 
value what  passes  for  culture.  Stated  coldly 
and  in  detail  they  are,  of  course,  impractic- 
able. No  nation  or  group  of  people  can  de- 
tach itself  from  the  complications  of  modern 
civilization.  Hamsun  the  sociologist  is  not 
on  a  par  with  Hamsun  the  poet.  But  when 
he  leads  us  back  to  the  deep,  primeval  well- 
springs  without  which  our  civilization  must 
wither  and  die,  it  is  Hamsun  the  poet  who 
speaks. 


GROWTH  OF  THE  SOIL 

IN  "Growth  of  the  Soil"  Hamsun  has  con- 
centrated the  message  which,  in  more 
or  less  fragmentary  form  lies  scattered 
through  his  works:  that  everything  else  is 
small  compared  with  the  one  essential  thing, 
to  be  in  unison  with  nature  and  to  work  with 
nature  in  "a  great  friendliness."  There  he 
preaches  with  massive  reiteration  that  the  sal- 
vation of  the  modern  world  lies  in  getting 
back  to  the  land,  and  by  his  poetic  treatment 
he  has  linked  the  doctrine  with  the  fight  men 
have  waged  since  the  beginning  of  human  life 
on  earth. 

Without  the  artifice  of  distant  time  and 
place,  in  the  midst  of  modern  conditions 
painted  with  realism  and  often  with  humor, 
he  has  created  an  illusion  of  the  primeval. 
It  is  as  though  Isak,  the  man  without  a  sur- 
name, coming  we  know  not  whence,  walking 
through  the  forest  in  search  of  a  place  where 

148 


The  Citizen 

he  can  begin  to  till  the  soil,  were  the  first 
man  in  a  newly  created  world.  "There  goes 
a  path  through  the  forest.  Who  made  it? 
The  man,  the  human  being,  the  first  one  who 
came."  He  walks  all  day  over  the  moors  in 
the  great  stillness,  turning  the  sod  occasion- 
ally to  examine  its  possibilities,  then  walks 
again  until  night  comes.  Then  he  sleeps  a 
while  with  his  head  on  his  arm,  and  walks 
again  until  he  finds  the  right  place  for  him- 
self, and  there  he  makes  his  first  home  on  a 
bed  of  pine  needles  under  a  projecting  rock. 
After  this  prelude,  which  has  a  cadence 
like  the  first  chapter  of  Genesis,  Hamsun  al- 
lows us  to  follow  the  story  of  how  the  shelter 
under  a  rock  became  a  farm.  There  were 
no  banks  for  lending  money  to  pioneer  farm- 
ers and  no  societies  for  the  reclamation  of 
waste  land,  or  if  there  were,  Isak  knew  noth- 
ing about  them.  He  was  only  one  man  who 
met  nature  alone.  After  a  while  a  woman 
came  to  him  out  of  nowhere  and  did  not  leave 
him  again.  Inger  was  hare-lipped,  and  Isak 
with  his  fierce  beard  and  grotesque  strength 
looked  like  a  troll  of  the  forest;  for  Hamsun 

149 


Knut  Hamsun 

has  scorned  to  throw  even  the  glamour  of 
youth  and  rustic  beauty  over  the  pair.  They 
were  simply  man  and  woman,  brought  to- 
gether by  the  most  elemental  needs,  working 
together,  helping  each  other,  meeting  the  de- 
mands of  each  day  as  they  arose,  and  resting 
when  night  fell.  The  picture  of  their  early 
days  together,  their  delight  in  each  other  and 
their  surprise  at  all  the  wonders  that  happen 
to  them,  is  full  of  innocent,  primitive  charm. 

There  is  an  idyllic  beauty  about  the  first 
chapters  of  the  book,  but  "Growth  of  the 
Soil"  is  not  primarily  an  idyl.  It  is  the  story 
of  human  achievement  centering  in  Isak's  in- 
tense, never-ceasing  effort  to  subdue  the  small 
part  of  the  earth  which  he  has  taken  for  his 
own.  It  is  almost  as  though  he  were  really 
the  first  man  without  the  accumulated  re- 
sources of  civilization  behind  him.  He 
sleeps  under  the  rock  until  he  has  completed 
a  sod  hut  which  gives  him  shelter  against  the 
cold  and  rain,  and  by  and  by  a  window  is 
added  to  let  in  the  daylight.  In  the  course 
of  time  the  sod  hut  gives  place  to  a  real  house 
of  logs,  and  the  sod  hut  can  be  left  to  the  an- 

150 


The  Citizen 

imals.  One  day  Inger  disappears  leaving 
Isak  feeling  very  lost  and  lonely,  but  presently 
she  comes  back  leading  a  cow,  an  event  so 
great  and  wonderful  that  they  spend  their  first 
wakeful  night  discussing  it.  Isak  can  hardly 
believe  that  the  cow  is  theirs,  but  he  makes 
the  retort  courteous  by  bringing  a  horse  for 
his  contribution.  As  for  goats  and  sheep, 
they  are  already  a  little  herd.  The  meadows 
yield  grass,  the  grain  ripens  for  harvest. 
Everything  grows  and  thrives,  grain,  animals, 
human  beings.  There  is  a  fruitfulness,  a 
teeming,  a  bringing  forth  of  everything  that 
lives  on  the  earth  and  by  the  earth.  It  is  like 
looking  on  at  a  bit  of  the  creation  of  the  world. 
And  there  are  Biblical  parallels  too  with  the 
man  who  came  across  the  moor  with  a  bag  of 
bread  and  cheese  and  became  the  patriarch  of 
a  countryside. 

Isak's  strong,  unused  brain  is  developed  by 
the  necessity  for  helping  himself.  He  in- 
vents various  clever  contrivances.  He  learns 
how  to  plan  his  work  and  fit  one  task  into 
another  so  that  every  month  of  the  year  is 
utilized  to  the  utmost  advantage.  He  sows 


Knut  Hamsun 

and  reaps  and  mows ;  he  threshes  the  grain  on 
a  threshing-floor  of  his  own  construction  and 
grinds  it  in  a  mill  which  he  has  also  made. 
He  fells  and  trims  the  logs  for  his  house, 
cuts  them  in  a  saw-mill  which  he  has  made 
with  infinite  effort  and  cogitation,  and  fits 
them  together  in  the  expert  fashion  which  he 
has  learned  by  studying  the  methods  used  in 
the  village.  The  foundation  has  been  laid  of 
stones  from  his  own  land,  lifted  with  his  own 
brawny  strength.  An  especially  huge  stone 
or  an  unusually  big  piece  of  timber  put  in 
its  place  is  to  him  as  real  a  triumph  as  the 
honors  and  emoluments  of  the  world  are  to 
the  more  sophisticated.  Isak  revels  in  his 
work,  and  his  powers  grow  with  his  tasks. 
He  is  a  happy  man. 

The  contrast  between  Isak's  absorption  in 
his  work  and  the  lazy,  discontented  apathy  of 
the  industrial  laborers  in  "Segelfoss  City"  is, 
of  course,  evident.  In  the  same  manner  the 
upbringing  of  his  boys  is  contrasted  with  the 
education  of  children  who  are  put  through 
the  usual  school  routine.  While  the  lat- 
ter are  mere  passive  recipients  of  a  knowl- 

152 


The  Citizen 

edge  which  is  thrust  upon  them  from  the 
outside  without  regard  to  their  needs,  the 
boys  in  the  wilderness  are  allowed  to  de- 
velop naturally  and  from  within.  Every 
bit  of  knowledge  that  they  acquire  comes  in 
response  to  the  necessity  for  meeting  a  prac- 
tical situation.  They  are  stimulated  by  their 
father's  example,  as  they  are  allowed  to  help 
him,  and  they  exert  their  small  brains  to  give 
the  right  answer  when  he  asks  their  advice  in 
all  seriousness.  Hamsun  here  returns  to  the 
subject  of  the  transplanted  country  boy  which 
has  engaged  his  interest  from  the  publication 
of  "Shallow  Soil,"  and  allows  the  elder  of 
Isak's  boys,  Eleseus,  to  attract  the  interest  of 
a  visitor  who  takes  him  to  town  and  puts  him 
in  an  office.  The  result  is  that  the  boy  wilts 
like  an  uprooted  plant.  He  is  not  bad,  he 
is  simply  futile.  He  has  lost  interest  in 
country  pursuits  without  having  any  marked 
abiliy  that  would  insure  him  a  career  in  the 
city,  and  he  has  been  imbued  with  the  idea 
that  it  would  be  a  step  downward  for  him 
to  go  back  from  his  poorly  paid  office  job  to 
the  work  of  the  farm.  When  he  comes  home, 

'53 


Knut  Hamsun 

he  tries  hard  to  please  his  father,  for  he  is  a 
good,  affectionate  lad,  but  he  has  lost  the 
poise  of.  those  who  have  stayed  on  the  land. 
He  has  been  infected  by  the  restlessness  of 
those  who  have  no  resources  in  themselves, 
but  are  for  ever  running  about  to  have  their 
emptiness  filled  by  the  drippings  from  other 
people's  lives — from  newspapers,  moving 
pictures,  street  corner  gossip.  Sivert,  the 
younger  brother,  stays  at  home,  and  it  is  he 
who  continues  to  build  on  the  foundation 
laid  by  the  father. 

The  people  in  the  wilderness  have  not  had 
their  minds  made  a  sieve  for  the  happenings 
of  the  outside  world  and  have  not  inhaled  the 
mental  atmosphere  that  has  been  breathed 
again  and  again  by  millions  of  people. 
Their  imaginations  are  fresh  and  strong,  and 
they  have  time  to  live  to  the  full  in  whatever 
happens  to  them.  From  every  experience 
they  draw  the  utmost  that  it  contains  of  joy 
or  sorrow.  There  is  stillness  and  breadth  of 
vision.  Everything  has  its  appointed  place, 
and  though  human  beings  in  their  flightiness 
may  stray  from  their  orbit,  the  great  forces 

154 


The  Citizen 

that  dwell  in  nature  draw  them  back  and  hold 
them. 

There  is  bigness  and  simplicity  in  their  joys 
and  sorrows  and  even  in  their  sins.  When 
Inger  kills  her  hare-lipped  baby  to  save  it 
from  the  suffering  she  has  endured  because 
of  the  blemish  in  her  own  face,  the  story  of 
how  she  buries  the  little  body  in  the  baptismal 
robe  of  her  firstborn  and  puts  a  cross  on  the 
grave  is  profoundly  touching.  Her  real  grief 
and  repentance,  her  meek  submission  to  pun- 
ishment and  her  thankfulness  that  her  life  is 
spared,  Isak's  grief  and  unfailing  love,  his 
loneliness  and  longing  for  her  return  from 
prison,  all  these  belong  to  people  who  meet 
life  without  evasion  or  subterfuge. 

While  Inger's  crime  is  raised  to  the  level 
of  tragedy,  the  story  of  the  girl  Barbro  who 
kills  her  two  children  in  pure  wantonness  and 
is  acquitted  in  the  new  "humane"  spirit  after 
a  parody  of  a  trial,  is  a  hideous,  sordid  tale. 
Hamsun  here  contrasts  the  people  who  live 
among  the  great  realities,  accepting  the  con- 
sequences of  their  deeds,  with  those  who  have 
learned  to  play  tricks  with  life  and  cheat  the 

155 


Knut  Hamsun 

Goddess  of  Justice.  This  to  a  certain  ex- 
lent  justifies  the  inclusion  of  Barbro's  story 
in  the  book,  although  it  mars  the  big  epic 
lines  of  the  rest  by  its  rather  journalistic  at- 
tacks on  criminal  procedure  and  satire  of 
a  certain  type  of  "advanced"  woman  who 
espouses  Barbro's  cause.  It  was,  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  an  outgrowth  of  some  polemical  ar- 
ticles with  the  keynote  "Hang  them!"  which 
Hamsun  wrote  in  the  Norwegian  press,  when 
the  growing  slackness  in  the  treatment  of 
women  indicted  for  child  murder  had  roused 
his  indignation.  Ugly  as  the  story  is,  it  ends 
on  the  note  of  optimism  which  runs  like  a 
golden  vein  through  "Growth  of  the  Soil." 
There  is  a  hint  that  Barbro  and  her  lover,  the 
hard,  grasping  farmer,  as  they  marry  and  set- 
tle down  to  till  the  soil,  may  be  reclaimed 
by  their  work  in  harmony  with  the  beneficent 
forces  of  nature.  There  is  a  suggestion  that 
nature  is  great  enough  to  absorb  even  the  vi- 
cious and  take  them  into  her  service. 

Isak  himself,   a  tiller  of  the  soil  by  the 
grace  of  God,  is  the  one  person  in  the  book 


The  Citizen 

who  never  deviates  from  the  straight  course. 
He  is  immutably  rooted  in  the  eternal  verities. 
As  the  story  progresses,  his  figure  grows  until 
it  assumes  a  certain  grandeur.  He  draws 
from  his  humble  work  a  deep  and  gentle  com- 
prehension. There  is  forgiveness  in  him  and 
strength  to  raise  up  what  life  has  shattered. 
Isak  has  his  oddities,  but  they  light  up  his 
character  like  sunbeams  playing  over  the  face 
of  a  rock.  How  inimitable,  for  instance,  the 
story,  told  with  Hamsun's  gift  of  comicality 
without  malice,  of  how  Isak  brings  home  a 
mowing-machine,  the  first  seen  in  the  neigh- 
borhood; of  how  he  drives  solemnly  sitting 
on  the  machine  in  his  best  winter  suit  and  hat, 
as  befits  the  importance  of  the  occasion,  al- 
though the  sweat  is  running  down  his  face; 
how  he  swells  under  the  admiration  of  his 
womankind,  and  how  he  pretends  that  he  has 
forgotten  his  spectacles,  because,  in  fact, 
he  can  make  neither  head  or  tail  of  the 
printed  instructions.  When  fate  plays  him 
the  trick  of  letting  the  spectacles  slip  out  of 
his  pocket,  although  the  boys  pretend  they  do 

157 


Knut  Hamsun 

not  see  it,  Isak  is  conscious  that  he  is  per- 
haps being  punished  for  his  overweening 
pride. 

Isak's  superstitions  always  take  the  form  of 
thinking  that  when  he  does  what  is  required 
of  him,  fate  will  be  merciful.  His  dim  reli- 
gious sense,  drawing  all  the  small  things  of 
life  in  under  the  shelter  of  a  great  fundamen- 
tal Tightness  which  rules  the  world  and  in 
some  mysterious  way  takes  cognizance  of  his 
affairs,  reminds  me  of  "Adam  Bede."  Isak 
never  read  any  book  except  the  almanac  and 
could  not  formulate  his  thoughts  on  religion, 
but  he  feels  God  in  the  loneliness,  under  the 
starry  heavens,  and  in  the  might  of  the  forest. 
He  meets  God  one  night  on  the  moor  and  does 
not  deny  that  he  has  also  met  the  devil,  but 
he  drives  him  away  in  Jesu  name.  When  the 
children  grow  large  enough  to  ask  questions, 
he  can  not  teach  them  anything  out  of  books, 
and  the  Catechism  is  generally  allowed  to  re- 
pose on  the  shelf  with  the  goat  cheeses,  but  he 
tells  them  how  the  stars  are  made  and  im- 
plants the  dream  in  their  hearts. 

An  act  which  has  something  of  an  almost 


The  Citizen 

priestly  function  is  the  sowing  of  grain.  That 
newfangled  fruit,  the  potato,  could  be  planted 
by  women  and  children,  but  grain,  which 
meant  bread,  had  to  be  sown  by  the  head  of  the 
house,  and  Isak  went  about  his  task  devoutly 
as  his  forefathers  had  done  for  hundreds  of 
years,  sowing  the  grain  in  Jesu  name.  Twice 
Hamsun  repeats  the  description  of  Isak  sow- 
ing, and  it  is  like  a  picture  by  Millet.  With 
head  religiously  bared,  he  walks  in  the  setting 
sun,  his  great  beard  and  bushy  hair  stand- 
ing round  him  like  a  wheel,  his  limbs  like 
gnarled  trees,  while  the  tiny  grains  fly  from 
his  hands  in  an  arch  and  fall  like  a  rain  of 
gold  into  the  ground. 

It  is  difficult  at  this  time  to  say  how  future 
generations  will  judge  "Growth  of  the  Soil." 
We  are  still  too  near  the  events  that  made  it 
to  us  an  epochal  book.  It  would  be  easy  to 
pick  flaws,  and  I  have  already  mentioned  what 
seems  to  me  its  most  serious  fault,  the  inclu- 
sion of  an  arid  waste  of  discussion  on  child 
murder  and  its  punishment.  It  would  be  easy, 
too,  to  say  that  its  purpose  was  too  patent, 
its  sermon  too  direct.  Nevertheless,  the  very 

159 


Knut  Hamsun 

simplicity  and  bigness  of  this  purpose  make  it 
susceptible  to  artistic  treatment,  and  I  think 
there  can  be  no  question  but  that  Hamsun  has 
produced  a  great  piece  of  literature  which 
will  stand  the  test  of  time. 

What  matters,  after  all,  is  not  what  critics 
will  say  of  its  esthetic  merits.  The  supreme 
importance  of  the  book  lies  in  the  fact  that 
to  Hamsun's  own  generation  it  has  given  po- 
etic form  to  a  message  for  which  the  world 
was  thirsting.  At  a  time  when  humanity  was 
sick  of  destruction  he  reminded  us  that  nature's 
fountain  of  renewal  is  inexhaustible.  In  an 
age  which  has  been  saddened  by  the  perni- 
cious doctrine  of  competition,  the  survival  of 
the  fittest,  and  all  the  slogans  of  false  Dar- 
winism, he  preached  the  gospel  of  friendli- 
ness. We  have  been  told  that  nature  is  cruel ; 
Hamsun  says  that  nature  is  friendly  and  benef- 
icent. We  have  been  told  that  all  existence 
rests  on  fierce  competition  in  which  the 
weaker  must  go  under.  He  does  not  deny 
that  the  battle  is  to  the  strong  and  the  race  to 
the  swift;  Isak  does  what  no  weaker  man 
could  have  compassed,  but  Isak  treads  down 

1 60 


The  Citizen 

no  one  on  his  way.  On  the  contrary,  his 
strength  is  the  shelter  under  which  the  weaker 
can  grow  and  flourish.  He  made  the  first 
path,  but  scores  of  people  and  hundreds  of 
animals  come  to  live  in  the  wilderness  through 
which  he  walked  alone. 

Competition  with  its  fear  and  agony  arises 
because  people  want  to  run  faster  than  life. 
Peace  and  happiness  are  found  in  keeping 
pace  with  life.  The  modern  business  man  is 
like  the  lightning  which  flashes  here  and  there, 
"But  lightning  as  lightning  is  sterile,"  says 
Geissler,  the  author's  spokesman;  and  he 
speaks  words  of  wisdom  to  young  Sivert  of 
Sellanraa:  "Look  at  you  Sellanraa  people: 
every  day  you  gaze  at  some  blue  mountains. 
They  are  not  figments  of  the  imagination,  they 
are  old  mountains  sunk  deep  in  the  past;  and 
you  have  them  for  companions.  You  live 
here  with  heaven  and  earth  and  are  one  with 
them,  you  are  one  with  all  the  broad  and 
deeply-rooted  things.  You  do  not  need  a 
sword  in  your  hands;  you  meet  life  bare- 
headed and  bare-handed  in  the  midst  of  a 
great  friendliness.  Look,  there  is  nature,  it 

161 


Knut  Hamsun 

belongs  to  you  and  to  your  people!  Men  and 
nature  are  not  bombarding  each  other,  they 
agree.  They  are  not  competing  or  running 
a  race,  they  go  together.  In  the  midst  of  this 
you  Sellanraa  people  exist.  The  mountains, 
the  woods,  the  moors,  the  meadows,  the  hea- 
vens, and  the  stars — oh,  nothing  of  this  is 
poor  and  grudging,  it  is  without  measure. 
Listen  to  me,  Sivert,  be  content!  You  have 
everything  to  live  on,  everything  to  live  for, 
everything  to  believe  in,  you  are  born  and 
produce,  you  are  the  necessary  ones  on  earth. 
Not  all  are  necessary  on  earth,  but  you  are. 
You  preserve  life.  From  generation  to  gen- 
eration you  exist  in  nothing  but  fruitfulness, 
and  when  you  die  another  generation  carries 
it  on.  That  is  what  is  meant  by  life  eternal." 


THE  WANDERER  ARRIVED 

TWO  tendencies  war  with  each  other 
in  the  temperament  of  the  Norwe- 
gians. One  has  made  them  vikings, 
explorers,  seafarers,  and  pioneers;  the  other 
has  made  them  home-builders  and  tillers  of 
the  soil.  One  is  restless,  impatient  of  re- 
straint, avid  for  new  experiences  and  for  ever- 
shifting  forms  of  life;  the  other  longs  for  the 
homeland,  and  seeks  to  strike  roots  deep  in  the 
spot  of  earth  made  sacred  by  the  toil  of  the 
forefathers. 

In  Knut  Hamsun  both  these  tendencies  are 
present  and  are  accentuated  by  his  double 
racial  heritage,  his  birth  in  an  old  peasant 
family  of  Gudbrandsdalen  and  his  upbring- 
ing among  the  lively,  adventurous  fisherfolk 
of  Nordland.  In  his  work,  the  two  strains 
are  evident,  the  former  predominating  in  his 
earlier,  the  latter  in  his  recent  books.  Glahn, 
the  untamed  hunter  and  nomad,  is  a  true 

163 


Knut  Hamsun 

child  of  the  author's  spirit,  but  so  is  Isak, 
the  farmer  and  home-builder.  The  common 
bond  that  unites  them  is  that  both  are  closely 
affiliated  with  nature,  one  as  the  passionate 
lyrical  worshipper  of  Pan,  the  other  as  the 
humble  servant  of  nature's  fruitfulness. 

In  the  personal  life  of  the  author  the  same 
divergent  tendencies  may  be  traced.  He  has 
been  a  wanderer  on  the  face  of  the  earth,  a 
vagrant  laborer  in  Norway,  a  pioneer  in 
America,  a  visitor  to  the  capitals  of  Europe, 
a  traveller  in  the  Orient.  But  deep  inherited 
instincts  have  always  drawn  him  homeward. 
He  has  sought  a  place  where  his  own  life 
could  strike  root.  Since  the  year  1896  he 
has  made  his  home  in  Norway,  and  ever  since 
the  financial  returns  of  his  early  books  made 
it  possible,  has  lived  on  his  own  land  and  culti- 
vated it.  His  first  home  was  in  Nordland,  at 
Hamaroy  in  Salten.  There  he  lived  for 
many  years,  surrounded  by  the  wild,  majestic, 
yet  ingratiating  scenery  which  impressed  him 
in  boyhood  and  which  he  has  so  often  pictured. 
In  1917  he  removed  to  the  south  of  Norway, 
and,  after  a  short  residence  at  Larvik  on  the 

164 


The  Citizen 

Christianiafjord,  chose  his  present  home  near 
Grimstad,  the  small  seaport  town  where  Ibsen 
spent  his  unhappy  youth  as  an  apothecary's  ap- 
prentice. There  he  has  bought  the  estate 
Norholmen  with  a  fine  mansion  several  hun- 
dred years  old. 

Though  Hamsun  has  lived  as  much  as  pos- 
sible in  the  outskirts  of  human  settlement  and 
has  always  kept  in  retirement,  denying  him- 
self to  sightseers  and  above  all  to  interviewers, 
the  kindliness  which  breathes  from  his  work 
and,  in  spite  of  his  nervous  shyness,  emanates 
from  his  personality,  has  made  him  very 
much  beloved  in  his  own  country.  A  very 
sympathetic  picture  of  his  home  life  is  pre- 
sented by  the  Norwegian  newspaper  writer, 
Thomas  Vetlesen,  who  in  the  autumn  of  1920 
was  admitted  to  Hamsun's  home  through  the 
good  offices  of  the  government.  As  it  is  the 
only  authentic  account  we  have,  I  will  quote 
here  a  portion  of  the  article  which  appeared 
in  the  Norwegian  press. 

"After  a  half  hour's  drive  (from  Grim- 
stad) we  enter  a  lane  of  hazel  nut  bushes, 
bending  over  the  road  weighted  by  their  full, 


Knut  Hamsun 

heavy  clusters  of  nuts.  Soon  we  catch  sight 
of  Hamsun's  white,  two-story  house  at  the  end 
of  a  quiet  bight  of  the  sea,  not  far  from  the 
main  road.  The  automobile  swings  into  the 
large  yard  with  a  quick,  accustomed  motion, 
and  stops  in  front  of  the  kitchen  steps.  The 
noise  has  announced  my  arrival,  and  presently 
the  yard  is  full  of  people.  Fru  Hamsun  and 
the  children  receive  the  stranger  and  wel- 
come him  to  their  home.  There  is  Tore  and 
Arild  and  Elinor  and  the  lovely  little  Cecilie 
— a  pretty  four-leaf  clover  at  ages  ranging 
from  three  to  nine  summers. 

"Within  the  house  the  spacious  rooms  with 
their  pleasant  old-fashioned  style  of  building 
breathe  a  spirit  of  hospitality.  There  is  a 
garden  room  turning  out  toward  the  road,  a 
dining-room,  a  wide  hall  with  a  staircase  lead- 
ing to  the  upper  story  and  on  the  other  side 
of  it  a  series  of  smaller  rooms. 

"Knut  Hamsun  comes  in  quickly  from  the 
hall,  straight  and  tall,  with  powerful  shoul- 
ders and  head  unbent  by  time  and  mental 
labor.  His  handclasp  is  firm  and  warm,  but 
in  his  melodious  voice  there  is  an  undertone 

166 


The  Citizen 

of  something  veiled,  wistful,  almost  hurt, 
which  suggests  the  tremendous  mental  strain 
his  intensive  work  has  subjected  him  to  for 
many  years  past. 

"At  the  supper  table  Hamsun  asks  about 
mutual  friends,  touches  lightly  on  current 
events,  but  is  not  talkative.  Occasionally  he 
seems  to  remember  suddenly  that  he  is  getting 
too  taciturn.  But  his  thoughts  are  in  Hazel 
Valley  where  he  has  chosen  for  his  work  room 
an  ancient  cottage  built  in  the  wilderness  for 
herders.  There  he  spends  the  entire  day  out- 
side of  meal  hours,  surrounded  by  the  great 
stillness  and  by  what  seems  a  chaos  of  small 
bits  of  white  paper  filled  with  writing.  Here 
is  his  work  room,  here  he  can  have  peace. 
Woe  to  him  who  would  draw  near  to  his 
circles!  As  yet  no  one  has  ever  done  it  with 
impunity.  There  are  the  wildest  reports  cur- 
rent about  the  more  than  simple  appointments 
of  this  Tusculum,  where  he  has  conceived 
and  written  his  books  for  some  years  past. 

"After  supper,  when  he  has  lit  his  pipe, 
Hamsun  generally  selects  a  chair  near  the 
sofa  where  he  has  placed  his  visitor,  and  then 

167 


Knut  Hamsun 

he  unbends.  Quietly  and  naturally,  the  con- 
versation turns  on  many  things.  He  can  ask 
questions,  and  he  can  tell  a  story  well,  vividly 
and  entertainingly,  in  a  vein  all  his  own.  His 
comments  are  often  startling,  full  of  cut  and 
thrust,  never  malicious,  but  instinct  with  kind- 
liness and  understanding.  As  he  talks,  the 
listener  is  deeply  conscious  of  the  fact  that  he 
is  a  good  man,  a  sensitive  nature,  with  a  heart 
and  a  spirit  open  to  the  weal  and  woe  of  hu- 
manity. And  there  is  music  in  his  voice. 
Even  when  talks  of  everyday  matters,  there 
is  about  everything  he  says  an  elevation  that 
makes  what  he  says  impressive.  It  is  like  a 
glimmer  of  northern  lights,  often  fantastic, 
always  fascinating  and  strangely  compelling. 
His  sense  of  humor  is  never  far  away,  and 
his  laughter  has  a  wonderfully  young  note 
rising  from  his  healthy  lungs.  .  .  . 

"The  interest  that  overshadows  everything 
else  in  his  mind  is  the  farm,  the  work  on  the 
fields,  in  the  barn,  and  with  the  cattle.  He 
cares  little  for  any  other  position  and  task 
than  that  of  the  farmer — with  the  possible  ex- 
ception of  the  sailor  and  the  aviator;  he  will- 

168 


The  Citizen 

ingly  admitted  that  the  latter  might  have  a 
great  future.  Nothing  delights  him  more 
than  when  he  finds  in  his  children  pro- 
clivities for  the  work  on  the  farm. 

"It  is  rare  to  see  a  man  so  fond  of  chil- 
dren as  Hamsun  is.  He  never  tires  of  hear- 
ing about  the  sayings  and  doings  of  his  four 
fine  children.  He  pays  attention  to  what- 
ever they  say  and  studies  their  different  apti- 
tudes and  their  thoughts.  .  .  . 

"Hamsun  has  a  very  large  library  contain- 
ing many  rare  and  curious  books.  What  he 
likes  best  to  read  is  memoirs  and  books  of 
travel.  In  addition  to  his  absorbing  work  on 
his  new  book  Women  at  the  Pump,'  he  has 
of  late  been  extremely  busy  developing  his 
estate  Norholmen.  He  has  accomplished 
much,  but  much  remains  to  be  done.  When 
in  future  years  it  is  completed,  it  will  form  an 
interesting  Hamsun  chapter  in  itself." 

While  the  author  has  been  living  his  quiet, 
retired  life,  divided  between  his  prodigious 
industry  as  a  writer  and  his  concern  for  home 
and  farm,  his  fame  has  been  spreading  to  the 

169 


Knut  Hamsun 

whole  civilized  world.  In  his  own  country 
he  has  long  been  acknowledged  king,  the 
greatest  "of  living  authors,  the  most  widely 
read,  the  most  beloved.  In  Sweden  critics 
have  acclaimed  him  as  the  most  popular 
writer  in  the  Scandinavian  North,  in  spite  of 
the  fact  that  Sweden  has  among  her  own  au- 
thors now  living  several  stars  of  the  first  mag- 
nitude. In  the  autumn  of  1920,  Knut  Ham- 
sun received  from  the  hand  of  the  Swedish 
king  the  greatest  formal  recognition  that  can 
come  to  any  man  of  letters,  the  Nobel  Prize 
for  literature.  Outside  of  the  Scandinavian 
countries  he  first  became  known  in  Russia, 
where  the  people  regard  him  almost  as  one  of 
their  own.  In  Germany  and  Austria  he  has 
also  been  widely  read  for  many  years  past.  In 
France  he  has  only  recently  become  known, 
while  in  England  and  America  it  was  the  tre- 
mendous impression  made  by  "Growth  of  the 
Soil"  which  drew  attention  to  his  earlier 
works  and  was  the  beginning  of  a  popularity 
that  promises  to  become  enduring  fame. 


170 


Knut  Hamsun's  Works 


HUNGER    (Suit)    1890.    Published  in  English 

MYSTERIES   (Mysterier)    1892 

EDITOR  LYNGE   (Redaktor  Lynge)    1893 

SHALLOW  SOIL   (Ny  Jord)    1893.     Published  in  English 

PAN   (Pan)    1894.     Published  in  English 

AT  THE  GATE  OF  THE  KINGDOM   (Ved  Rigets  Port)   1895 

THE  GAME  OF  LIFE  (Livets  Spil)   1896 

SIESTA   (Siesta)    1897 

SUNSET    (Aftenrode)    1898 

VICTORIA    (Victoria)    1898.     Published    in    English 

MUN'KEN  VENDT   (Munken  Vendt)    1902 

BRUSHWOOD   (Kratskog)    1903 

QUEEN  TAMARA    (Dronning   Tamara)    1903 

IN  FAIRYLAND  (I  SEventyrland)   1903 

DREAMERS    (Sveermere)    1904.     Published    in   English 

THE  WILD  CHORUS  (Det  Vilde  Kor)    1904 

STRUGGLING  LIFE  (Stridende  Liv)   1905 

UNDER  THE  AUTUMN  STAR  (Under  Hoststjernen)  1906.  Pub- 
lished in  English  with  A  WANDERER  PLAYS  ON  MUTED 
STRINGS  under  the  title  WANDERERS 

BENONI  (Benoni)    1908 

ROSA    (Rosa)    1908 

A  WANDERER  PLAYS  ON  MUTED  STRINGS  (En  Fandrer  spiller 
med  Sordin)  1909.  Published  in  English  with  UNDER  THE 
AUTUMN  STAR 

IN  THE  POWER  OF  LIFE   (Li-vet  Ivold)   1910 

THE  LAST  JOY   (Den  siste  Glade)   1912 

CHILDREN  OF  THE  AGE  (Born  af  Tiden)   1913 

SEGELFOSS  CITY  (Segelfoss  By)   1915 

GROWTH  OF  THE  SOIL  (Mar kens  Grade)  1917.  Published  in 
English 

WOMEN  AT  THE  PUMP   (Konerne  <ved  Vandposten)    1920 


000  673  080 


